Quotes About Legacy

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Literature lights the ages.

You are going to be fine — you come from a long line of lunatics.

There are no pockets in a shroud.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.

Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.

From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues our honors.

Each day of our lives we make deposits into the memory banks of our children.

Conservative: One who admires radicals a century after they're dead.

What we call real estate — the solid ground to build a house on — is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wrong — he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages — only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in.

A man's life is often builded on a proverb.

They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

I wish the first word I ever said was the word "quote" so right before I die I could say "unquote."

There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.

There are ten church members by inheritance for every one by conviction.

Bildad... had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his well-earned income.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

He turned being a Big Loser into a perfect triumph by managing to lose the presidency in a way bigger and more original than anyone else had ever lost it before.

How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.

Always a godfather, never a god.

Versteht sich, muß er sie bezahlen !" sagte er sich; aber er konnte schon wissen, daß er seinen Söhnen nie etwas zurückforderte und daß sie ihm nie etwas zu erstatten begehrten. Das ist Eltern gesund und läßt sie zu hohen Jahren kommen, auf daß sie erleben, wie ihre Kinder wiederum von den Enkeln lustig geschröpft werden, und so geht es von Vater auf Sohn und alle bleiben bestehen und haben guten Appetit.

Das Blut allein macht lange noch den Vater nicht.

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.