Quotes About Legacy

Time will take care of everyone until there are none of us to take care of.

Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.

When you're on your last legs, whether you're confined to a bed or screaming in a crashed-up car, many things may occur to you. Something that won't occur to you, either confined to a bed or screaming, is that it doesn't matter what you did or didn't do during your existence.

Only after everyone who ever remembered you is gone for good and all does the terrible insanity that once bore your name achieve a true oblivion. Good-bye.

How much of what we do, from the ridiculous to the sublime, would not be done if we did not die? In tha blank face of mortality we always ask , "What's next?

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.

When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which is inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.

Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

My lands showed like a full moon about me, but now the moon's i'the last quarter, waning, waning; and I am to think that moon was mine. Mine and my father's and my forefathers': generations, generations! Down goes the house of us, down, down it sinks. Now is the name a beggar, begs in me; that name, which hundreds of years has made this shire famous, in me and my posterity runs out.

Oh, breathe not his name! let it sleep in the shade,Where cold and unhonor'd his relics are laid.

The harp that once through Tara's hallsThe soul of music shed,Now hangs as mute on Tara's wallsAs if that soul were fled.

Go where glory waits thee!But while fame elates thee,Oh, still remember me!

Destiny never defames herself but when she lets an excellent poet die.

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.

For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free.

When the tumult of war shall cease, and the tempest of present passions be succeeded by calm reflection, or when those, who, surviving its fury, shall inherit from you a legacy of debts and misfortunes, when the yearly revenue scarcely be able to discharge the interest of the one, and no possible remedy be left for the other, ideas far different from the present will arise, and embitter the remembrance of former follies.

virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual.

As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man;

Most wise men, in their private sentiments, have ever treated hereditary right with contempt; yet