Quotes About Legacy

Hiccup the Second was gone forever, separated from the Dragon by an ocean of sky and time, and he could not come back to visit. But still, somehow, a tiny part of him was here, in the raggedy, awkward shape of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third. And the Dragon Furious loved him.

History is a ghost story.

Stories come from somewhere, said the witch. The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

I have always been particularly touched by the proverb about the purpose of life being to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I felt entangled now: this March, this South, this war, history. History could not possibly let the South get away with slavery; history would not possibly let us get away with what we were doing to the South. Somehow or other, we'd both have to pay.

The old ways, the old traditions are going by the board – young people have no respect for their elders any more –

She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time.

Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

I imagine the earth when I am no more: Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley. Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born, Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.

She was old; millions of years old, she felt.

It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.

he had read in the newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no other road to immortality.

And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

One may go against convention, but one must keep up tradition.

Can England die? And what if England dies?

I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget … Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little.