Quotes About Legacy

Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

We need a Napoleon. An Alexander. Except that Napoleon lost in the end, and Alexander flamed out and died young. We need a Julius Caesar, except that he made himself a dictator, and died for it.

I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.

Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.

He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we have forgotten him.

Oh, Val, said Father. All you have to do is live your life, and everyone around you will be happier. No greatness, then. Val, said Mother, goodness trumps greatness any day. Not in the history books, said Valentine. Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they? said Father.

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story–what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know–and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.

A man without a wife and babies is a menace to civilization... One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.

We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.

What a waste of time to be posthumously famous.

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

who would expect less? she said. You're a Wiggin. Whatever that means. He said. It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.

Val, said Mother, goodness trumps greatness any day. Not in the history books, said Valentine. Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they? said Father.

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never decide to cease to exist.

It was not right, thought Han Fei-tzu, for his wife to die before him: her ancestor-of-the-heart had outlived her husband. Besides, wives should live longer than husbands. Women were more complete inside themselves. They were also better at living in their children. They were never as solitary as a man alone.

History's got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can't be untied.

Why should I worry about uncreating so much of human history? Why should I care that it will be worse than forgotten, that it will be unknown? Why should that seem to be a crime, when all of human history is an eyeblink compared to the billions of years the stars have shone?

We're going to make him the best military commander in history. And then put the fate of the world on his shoulders.

Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that's so.

That's the way of the world: The princess can disappear, but the witch is forever.

I think we've taken a step toward something truly magnificent. But humankind almost never forgives true greatness.