Quotes About Legacy

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

In the end, it's not your Nobel Prize you're thinking of, it's not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It's your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it's your wives, your children, and how things went with them.

I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and – who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God's best jokes.

The father is dying, as did his (and as did his).

Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do.

I love words, that's all. And without this - (Holds up pen.) human history would fall into a black pit and there'd be almost no trace of it.

Great British painters, one might say, imitate the proverbial behaviour of buses. None come along for a century or more, then two at the same time. In the decades after 1800 there were J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, then none of international consequence, except perhaps Walter Sickert, until Bacon and Freud after the Second World War.

He never signed anything ever again, because he didn't need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.

But then, perhaps when we contemplate one of these sculptures we are not really looking at the Pharaoh Sesostris or Senusret but, as LF put it, at humanity. Nearly

When ibn Killis was on his deathbed the Caliph, deeply distressed, went to see his Jewish counsellor. The Caliph lamented: 'O Yaqub. How I wish that you were for sale so that I might buy you with my kingdom, or that you could be ransomed, that I might ransom you.'25 He later attended ibn Killis's funeral and laid his former adviser into the grave with his own hands–an extraordinary honour for a Muslim ruler to show to a Jew.

We shall never shake ourselves clear from the debts of the past and break into a definitely larger period except by the energetic creation of new wealth.

My life has been a pleasant one and though I should regret to leave it, it would be a regret that perhaps I should never know.

I know that everything essential and great originated from the fact that the human being had a homeland and was rooted in tradition.

The great collapses, the small remains forever.

It does not matter how long you live, but how well you do it.

Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

Si supiera que el mundo se acaba mañana, yo, hoy todavía, plantaría un árbol.

Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say.