Quotes About Legacy

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered

Always the following wind of history Of others' wisdom makes a buoyant air Till we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem Abrupt, untrained, competing with no lie Our fathers shouted once.

He shaped and molded that office to the contours of his own heroic stature.

The dead will think the living are worth it we will knowWho we areAnd we will all enlist again.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

Like shadowsof the plumbingthat is all that is leftof the great city.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered.

The Scholars "Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. They'll cough in the ink to the world's end; Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend; If they have sinned nobody knows. Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way?

They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.

I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

Seanchan (pronounced Shanahan), Chief Poet of Ireland.

King, whether you did right or wrong in this Let the King say, for all that I need say Is that there's nothing that cries out for death In the withholding of that ancient right

Here lies W.C.Fields. I'd rather be living in Philadelphia.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

Two hundred years from now nobody will care much about our politics. But if we were truly moved by the things that happened to us, they may read our poems.