Quotes About Legacy

Am I going to be in the same office doing the same thing? Am I going to live 90 years? Or am I going to live one year, 90 times, over and over again?

Living as If Your Life Makes a Difference

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you . . .

It seems as if people begin preparing themselves for death from the time they learn there is such a thing.

As much as some people try to deny it, no one gets off this planet alive. Life, in fact, is a terminal disease.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.*

Let the world know why you're here and do it with passion...Don't die with your music still inside you.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.

Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.

As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no longer rise in the mornings to be pleased with the green of them shining, and their shadows on the ground, and the sound of the wind in them.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.

And I told him that a man's life is always dealing with permanence - that the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary. That, anyhow, is what I've tried to keep before myself. What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.

The two families, sundered in the ruin of a friendship, were united again first in new friendship and then in mariage. My grandfather made a peace here that has joined many who would otherwise have been divided. I am the child of his forgiveness.

He had nothing he could do with is life's work now except leave it to a man who thought nothing of it.

All good human work remembers its history.

The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.

Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.

Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.

And on that day, we'll see the beauty that God has allowed us to add to the great story of his creation, the richness we've added to the lives of our family and friends, the mark for the better we've left on the world, and the revelation of his love that goes from age to age no matter how good or bad the times. We are each an unrepeatable, infinitely treasured part of that story. And this is why our lives matter.