Quotes About Legacy

It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.

Some are dining in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and no be the biggest pygmy he can be? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Muita gente se preocupa com os monumentos do ocidente e do oriente, quer saber quem os construiu. De minha parte, gostaria de saber quem nessa época deixou de construí-los, quem estava acima de tais ninharias.

Some men wonder at the monuments of the west and the east - to know who built them. For my part I should like to know who, in those days, did not build them, who were above such trifling

for this world a family mansion, and for the

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.

Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but to be still-born, rather.

When it's time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived.

The written word is the choicest of relics.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

A written word is the choicest of relics.

What is once well done is done forever.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.

while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably

What is once well done is forever

but why not even by their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves?

Don Juan : [...] Les voilà, mes spectres, les spectres de ce que je ne suis pas. Ce sont eux qui me persécutent et m'écoeurent, et qui me survivront. Ils vivront, car il sont le mensonge. Mais si je dois payer ma vie au prix de toutes les sottises et de tous les mensonges qu'on aura dits sur moi, peut-être vaudrait-il mieux n'avoir pas vécu. Je vais changer d'habit et mettre mon beau costume. Il faut être bien vêtu quand on va être arrêté.

I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.