Quotes About Legacy

We never know the love of our parents for us until we have become parents.

We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.

The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor; and no man can tell what becomes of his influence.

They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this Nation.

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away.

A library is but the soul's burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?

A peculiar gravity kept the white and black Hairstons at Cooleemee. Judge Hairston's grandfather had abandoned the house after the Civil War, but misfortune brought his family back to it. They had no other place to go. When the white Hairstons returned, so did the blacks. Thrown back together by necessity, the Hairstons acted out, in microcosm, the long aftermath of slavery.

His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.

When you understand that you will die tomorrow, if not today, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

If you once realize that to-morrow, if not to-day, you will die and nothing will be left of you, everything becomes insignificant!

No matter how old or how sick you are, how much or little you have done, your business in life not only isn't finished, but hasn't yet received its final, decisive meaning until your very last breath.

Let the dead bury their dead; but, while we are alive, let us live.

The most important acts, both for the one who accomplishes them and for his fellow creatures, are those that have remote consequences.

He spoke that refined French in which our grandparents not only spoke bit thought...

History – the amorphous, unconscious life within the swarm of humanity – exploits every minute in the lives of kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends.

If we're laying out a garden, planning one before the house, you know, and there you've a tree that's stood for centuries in the very spot. . . . Old and gnarled it may be, and yet you don't cut down the old fellow to make room for the flowerbeds, but lay out your beds so as to take advantage of the tree. You won't grow him again in a year . . .

Mento mori—remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die—what makes this any different from a half hour?

When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying?

Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?" "Of course, they must be counted. You didn't count them, but Ryabinin did. Ryabinin's children will have means of livelihood and education, while yours maybe will not!

Cor, what a godawful stink!" That was all that remained of this man in the land of the living.