Quotes About Legacy

If you've ever wondered where the good songs go After they've had their day, You'll be glad to meet a man I know, Wrinkled old and gray. He collects the tunes that time has thrown aside— Puts them under lock and key; For a penny he is glad to set them free.

We are the restless living, our names are not haloed by nostalgia.

But your eyes were bequeathed to me— As anathema And a blessing.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

A scholar's ink lasts longer than a martyr's blood.

The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.

But most- and worst- of all, as we and all the world slowly learned about the full extent of Hitler's Final Solution, we realized that all Germans, no matter what they had suffered or whether they had participated in any way in the atrocities, would bear guilt, shame and dishonor, probably forever.

To be born in Kentucky is a heritage; to brag about it is a habit; to appreciate it is a virtue.

Someday my paintings will be hanging in the Louvre. [Vincent Van Gogh]

There is no more desire to live past one's time than to die before it.

[John] Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Gorky is a forerunner—the most powerful in our time.

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.

Wherever he went he left footprints so firm that nobody could later efface or blur them, not even he himself, when on rare occasions he was tempted to do so.

in the end, the only thing that matters is what we do with the time that we have left.

Generational curses are actually blessings in disguise; the mistakes were already made for you, now all you have to do is apply the solutions.

To focus on your legacy when you're alive, is to detract from the time you could spend building it.