Quotes About Legacy

Turne, tot incassum fusos patiere labores et tua Dardaniis transcribi sceptra colonis?

Do you believe this is what the dead care about when they are buried in the grave?

Quisque suos patimur manes.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable --- this interminable life.

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

For most of history, anonymous was a woman.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.

before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books.

An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.

Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

Here have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths have left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing have left this. -Viginia Woolf

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

the whole of life, its masters, its adventurers, then appeared in long ranks of magnificent human beings behind me; and I was the inheritor; I, the continuer; I, the person miraculously appointed to carry it on.

We think back through our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women.

Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!

Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings. So that we are at liberty to suppose either that nothing was said, or that nothing witty was said, or that the fraction of three witty sayings lasted eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty nights, which does not leave a liberal allowance of wit for any one of them.