Quotes About Legacy

Moreover, The Art of War ends with a quiet coda whose firm assertion is too often overlooked: that even the most impressive empires fall as soon as their rulers, by their careless conduct, lose or cast aside the best men in their employ.

I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

history makes us who we are, but we can make history, also, and that anyone can be a hero, if they just choose to be.

never really thought about how when I look at the moon it's the same moon Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.

Before Julia Child there was only onion dip.

Together, Vita (Sackville-West) & Harold (Sir Harold Nicholson) had a passion bigger than them-selves, bigger than their marriage, bigger than everything~their garden. No matter what they did during their lives, the legacy they left for generations to come is pure magic.

May your coffin be made of the finest wood from a one-hundred-year-old tree that I'll go plant tomorrow. —TRADITIONAL IRISH BLESSING

All five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholics—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

There was something about Great-Uncle Merry that was like the hills, or the sea, or the sky; something ancient, but without age or end.

In the name of King Arthur, and of the old world before the dark came.

No, he didn't win," Great-Uncle Merry said, and even in the clear afternoon sunshine he seemed with every word to become more remote, as ancient as the rock behind him and the old world of which he spoke.

The future can not blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past.

The three generous men of the Island of Britain. Nudd the Generous, son of Senllyt. Mordaf the Generous, son of Serwan. Rhydderch the Generous, son of Tydwal Tudglyd. And Arthur himself was more generous than the three.

No child is wholly wrapped in the present who has grown up seeing a Norman castle from his or her bedroom window.

Many of the time-honored [parenting] techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation are, quite simply, bad advice masquerading as wisdom.

Strange as it may seem, many people are still controlled by their parents after their deaths. The ghosts that haunt them may not be real in a supernatural sense, but they're very real in a psychological one. A parent's demands, expectations, and guilt trips can linger long after that parent has died.

I have always believed that places with a long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air.

Parenthood only ends with the grave.

She didn't know the going price of cattle on the hoof, or the per acre value of land in this part of the country, but from what she could tell, no Nicholson was ever going to die poor.

The rules for raising children had gone out with her parents generation of daughters who had lived as Lucy had, in patient silence, acting by standards which had lasted generations, waiting to grow up to make their decisions, following the patterns of their own lives.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.

That's the source of the meditation on death I've carried in my heart all my life.

And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.)

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.