Quotes About Legacy

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life—a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world?

But when The Prince of Tides came out, thank God she was dead. I'm not sure I would have had the guts to publish that with her still alive.

The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

Pictures and words don't hurt anyone, except for those who are afraid of history.

I want my family to resemble the family I came from.

Ghosts are both remnants of history and witnesses to it.

Ghost stories are how we forgive houses for daring to outlive us.

One stupid quiz about one stupid thing that happened three hundred years ago to a bunch of people nobody cared about, that didn't have anything to do with real life.

Joan of Arc was their patron saint, and I heard that they died out in part because girls were required to join by the time they were fifteen.

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!

I hope everybody's had fun, because I've enjoyed my ride. I can tell you that. Now it's time to step aside and let some other young kid come in and win. Hopefully, they will, too.

Dying could be a bit of a problem, but not if you had really lived. Dying needed a certain amount of preparation and the only preparation for dying was real living

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

I'm a student of history. Revolutions only get names after it's clear who won.

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies, for the world needs such men more than heaven does.

What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.

Look at their arts, their power of turning stone into lifelike figures, and above all, the way in which they can transfer their thoughts to white leaves, so that others, many many years hence, can read them and know all that was passing, and what men thought and did in the long bygone. Truly it is marvelous.

The fort has already been named the Fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The capital will be named alike after the patron saint and its founder--Petersburg.

Is all one generation can do to set the stage for the comic, sad story of the next?