Quotes About Legacy

Everyone likes to think that he has done reasonably well in life, so that it comes as a shock to find our children believing differently. The temptation is to tune them out; it takes much more courage to listen.

Our sons, who so easily recognize our errors, and rightly denounce them, will have to confess their own, later on, and they may be as bad as ours, perhaps worse.

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Augustus Caesar

Every beauty and greatness in this world is created by a single thought or emotion inside a man. Every thing we see today, made by past generations, was, before its appearance, a thought in the mind of a man or an impulse in the heart of a woman.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Goethe said there would be little left of him if he were to discard what he owed to others.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.

Liberty cannot be caged into a charter and handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves.

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!

As to posterity, I may ask what has it ever done to oblige me?

The greatest man in history was the poorest.

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

It's pleasant to hear these nice words while I'm still alive. I'd rather have the taffy than the epitaphy.

See to it, night and day, that you pray for your children. Then you will leave them a great legacy of answers to prayer, which will follow them all the days of their life. Then you may calmly and with a good conscience depart from them, even though you may not leave them a great deal of material wealth.

I have taught you, my dear flock, for above thirty years how to live; and I will show you in a very short time how to die.

No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.

Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeing meteor, a fast flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, Man passes from life to his rest in the grave.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spenser is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.