Quotes About Legacy

They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.

Those who desire immortality must pay for it with their lives.

When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

Laplace is reported to have said on his deathbed that science was mere trifling, and that nothing was real but love.

On his tombstone only three words were necessary:   HERE LIES VOLTAIRE

for every deliberate death there are thousands of indeliberate births.

Ars longa, vita brevis—art is long and time is fleeting: this is the tragedy of every great soul.

On his desk, when he died, there lay a paper on which he had written his last, and perhaps his most characteristic, sentences: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.

What immortality means to me now is that we are all parts of a whole, cells in the body of life; that the death of the part is the life of the whole; and that though as individuals we pass away, yet the whole is made forever different by what we have done and been.

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

virtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.

Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world.

The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world.XVI

Such was the end of our friend, whom I may truly call the wisest, the justest, and best of all the men whom I have ever known.

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

On his tombstone only three words were necessary: HERE LIES VOLTAIRE

Generaciones de hombres establecen un dominio creciente sobre la tierra, pero están destinados a convertirse en fósiles en su suelo.

Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

A man's shortcomings," said Goethe, "are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

At the end, we meet death. Just as experience begins to coördinate itself into wisdom, brain and body begin to decay.

Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome:

Government and History

the royal revenue was doubled from 600 to 1200 livres ($240,000) a day. In his reign the façade of Notre Dame was completed, and the Louvre was built as a fortress to guard the Seine.62 When Philip died (1223) the France of today had been born.