Quotes About Legacy

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

Here I am...wanting to accomplish something and completely forgetting it must all end--that there is such a thing as death.

even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it's not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother.

Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he'll never write again. That's our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you're married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn't in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book.

I have wrote my name in hell," Brian McFee had said as he was dying on the sawdust of the floor in the Bent Ridge Tavern.

Jack turned red,I kinda let a princess die. His grandfather groaned. You do realize that's not a good thing to do, right? the old man asked. So I'm told.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance.

It was among the knowledgeable others that one hoped to be talked about and admired. It was not impossible—the world of squadrons is small. The years would bow to you; you would be remembered, your name like a thoroughbred's, a horse that ran and won.

We think of Rome as an empire in a way that we do not use for other nations. The others are pretenders. Rome stands alone. Throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Near East its wreckage still draws the traveler and speaks a message that is haunting: this was imperial, this was lasting, this is gone.

One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten — one hears of them no more.

Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.

His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

Dingen die je geschreven hebt, rijpen niet met je mee, zo lijkt me althans. De waarheid ervan kan bepaald zijn door de tijd, maar er bestaat niet zoiets als bij de tijd zijn wanneer de tijd voorbij is. Boeken blijven bestaan buiten de tijd om of ze houden op te bestaan. Dat is zoals het gaat in de literatuur. Boeken markeren een periode of een plaats, en geleidelijk worden ze die tijd en plaats'.

Their life was two things: it was a life, more or less—at least it was the preparation for one—and it was an illustration of life for their children.

Sonnet 55 that "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme" [1–2]).

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

The memorials best befitting Shakespeare's stature and accomplishments were in fact created and preserved by those who honoured his legacy: a monument and a gravestone in Stratford's church; and, seven years after his death, a lavish collection of his plays, prefaced by commendatory verses and his portrait. At the time, no English playwright had ever been posthumously honoured with such a collection.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

Fionn went [...] to carve a name for himself that will live while Time has an ear and knows an Irishman

She recognized that the assassination had transformed him into a hero too: 'Now, I think I should have known that he was magic all along- but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with [him] and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.

Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall . . . overcome.