Quotes About Legacy

Time worked unhurriedly, conscientiously. First the man was expelled from life, to reside instead in people's memories. Then he lost his right to residence in people's memories, sinking down into their subconscious minds and jumping out at someone only occasionally, like a jack-in-the-box, frightening them with the unexpectedness of his sudden, momentary appearances.

How many people there were like him – forgotten during unforgettable years.

Fue así, con una cadena milenaria, como el progreso ruso y la esclavitud rusa estaban ligados el uno al otro. Cada escalada hacia la luz ahondaba aún más el negro foso de la esclavitud.

Yo soy tu, querida madre, y mientras yo viva, tu también lo harás. Cuando muera, tu seguiras viviendo en este libro que te he dedicado y cuyo destino esta estrechamente atado a tu destino

Now, because we have spent so many years convincing the younger people that we are helpless, they believe that we are no longer of use to this world.

My grandmother and all those other elders from the past kept themselves busy until they could no longer move or until they died.

America, then, is only as good as the citizens of any era who choose to preserve and to nourish it for one more generation. Republics are so often lost not over centuries but within a single decade.3

England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare,but the Bible made England.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Brothers, he who dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded with the dawn.

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of the ages.

He was not his father, and this was not his work; but he was the master, and this was his masterpiece.

It is grievous for a man to leave behind him a shadow in his own shape.

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive, we attack it, and we try to kill it.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen, hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood, in the somber wheatfields, at the spot where today at four in the morning, whistling, and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Nivelles.

There are fathers who do not love their children; there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.

With Cosette's garter, Homer would make the Iliad. He would put into his poem an old babbler like me, and he would call him Nestor.

Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.

There is still a certain grace in a dead festival. It has been happy.

Those who have succeeded in procuring this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without uneasiness, — places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory capitulations of conscience, — and that they shall enter the tomb with their digestion accomplished.

Me, I'm much more than the master, I am the father.

Il paraît que les paroles des hommes forts doivent toujours recevoir de l'approche de la mort une certaine grandeur.