Quotes About Legacy

And so they lived many happy years, and the promised tasks were accomplished. Yet long afterward, when all had passed away into distant memory, there were many who wondered whether King Taran, Queen Eilonwy, and their companions had indeed walked the earth, or whether they had been no more than dreams in a tale set down to beguile children. And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.

This much have I learned: A mans life weighs more than glory, and a price paid in blood is a heavy reckoning.

Children are the root of all evil.... Happy the man who has his quiver empty.

We have a moral responsibility to save wild places like the arctic refuge for future generations, and that is why our country has remained committed to its protection for nearly 50 years.

Today the average lifetime is over seventy years, long enough for a great number of accomplishments. But this development has occurred within the present century. Before that, people tended to die much younger than they do today, and among those early deaths were those of many brilliant and talented people who had much to give the world. It is those people to whom I reach out. It is to them I offer the opportunity to return.

A person without regrets is called a corpse.

Every morning I read the obituaries. If it ain't there I make myself a cup of tea and carry on like I have the past century or so.

If you were to be lost in the river, Jonas, your memories would not be lost with you. Memories are forever.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.

If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I'd have had them first.

Down to the Plymouth Rock, that had been to their feet as a doorstep Into a world unknown -- the cornerstone of a nation!

The architect Built his great heart into these sculptured stones, And with him toiled his children, and their lives Were builded, with his own, into the walls, As offerings unto God.

The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.

Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

I am my own heir.

The light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates -- but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page

Old man! 'Tis not difficult to die.