Quotes About Legacy

the dark foil in this American story

And here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it necessarily be akin to the mortal frame where with, for a little while, I walk the streets

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!

To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life span as the measure of an interminable acheivement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.

The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.

the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is mossgrown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.

Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The

It is very singular, how the fact of man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.

Some maladies are rich and precious, and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.

The weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity.

Young Goodman Brown came forth, at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tomb-stone; for his dying hour was gloom.

there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood.

Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on the scale of public appreciation.

the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;

And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon-after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals-had given one farewell touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables

Así, antes que nadie, el huésped que visita todas las moradas humanas, la muerte, franqueó el umbral de La casa de los siete Tejados.

la actuación de la generación pasada es el germen que puede y debe dar un fruto bueno o malo en un tiempo muy distante; que, junto con la semilla de la cosecha meramente temporal -coveniencia, según los mortales-, se siembran de forma inevitable las simientes de una cosecha más perdurable, que puede ensombrecer su posteridad.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

No longer mindful of the debt they owed the Pokanokets, without whom their parents would never have endured their first year in America, some of the Pilgrims' children were less willing to treat Native leaders with the tolerance and respect their parents had once afforded Massasoit.

The Pilgrims' descendants have proven to be, if nothing else, fruitful. In 2002 it was estimated that there were approximately 35 million descendants of the Mayflower passengers in the United States, which represents roughly 10 percent of the total U.S. population.

By doing their best to destroy the Native people who had welcomed and sustained their forefathers, New Englanders had destroyed their forefathers' way of life.