Quotes About Legacy

Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children. More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own.

When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

Her mark on history: the female acquaintance.

She wondered how soon after the first baby was born of the rape of a black woman by a white man did some slaver decide that light-skinned slaves were smarter and better by virtue of white blood? And how long after that had some black people decided to take advantage of that myth?

Barbara died in 2013, but her legacy lives on in the laughter her books give to readers all over the world.

no such thing as death in her lexicon, and that as long as I lived and you lived she would live, too, for we would carry the memory of her in our hearts for ever.

Robert Adam was the great architect of the eighteenth century, Emma. He built many grand and beautiful

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing, therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to my fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. —Proverbial saying

tries, and tries very hard, but she doesn't know what it's like to be the sole survivor, the only one left of one's contemporaries. They've all gone now. They're all dead and buried. My dearest friends, my loved ones. Even my enemies are no longer around to get my goat and spark the will in me to fight.

Killed so tragically in a plane crash, in a plane he was flying himself; David Amory, her grandfather, who was aboard that plane

Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. —last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486

If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.

Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccupped their way into history?" "Sir, that's the best autobiography I ever heard!" I said enthusiastically.

To act here is to face one's own complicity, to choose to take life in order that one's own kin might continue to live. When I lie down to sleep far from home, I place this small work of art close by on a folded scarf.

For how can this be? How can it be? That from all the Ridgefield Parks of our time we will assemble to build the great engines which will take us to the stars... and some of the stars will bring death and others will bring life and then there are those which will bring us nothing at all, but the engines will continue, they will go on forever. And so, in a fashion, after our fashion, will we.

like all groups of Christians at all times and in all places, understood themselves to be the fortunate heirs of the truth, handed down to them by their faithful predecessors, who received their understandings about God, Christ, the world, and our place in it from people who should know—ultimately from the apostles of Jesus, and through them from Jesus himself, the one sent by God.

In my view, the early Christian Gospels are so much more than historical sources. They are memories of early Christians about the one they considered to be the most important person ever to walk the planet.

Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.

Achilles was the greatest mortal ever to have lived and is now the greatest among those who have died:

Augustus was deified and called "divine

a seven-letter Latin abbreviation that was as widely used in antiquity as "R.I.P." ("Rest in Peace," itself from the Latin requiescat in pace) has been in the modern world. The abbreviation is "n.f. f. n.s. n.c." Translated, it provides a most trenchant summary of the materialist views endorsed and promoted by Epicurus, Lucretius, and their followers: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—"I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.

Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation "RIP" ("Rest in Peace"). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: "I was not; I was; I am not; I care not." The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence.

Summer grasses, All that remains Of soldiers' dreams

The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.