Quotes About Legacy

??? ???? ??? The summer grasses— For many brave warriors The aftermath of dreams. - Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 316 (Translation: Donald Keene)

Both of you... what traits did you inherit from your mother?" "Oh. Hmm... I think I got all my bad traits from mother. But my fatal flaws are from father. " ...

We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

In 10 years' time, what do you want your name to be synonymous with?

There are people who appear in the magazines and I don't know who they are. I've never seen anything they've done and their careers are over already. They're famous for maybe 10 minutes. Real careers, I think, take a long time to unfold.

Stars shine long after they've flamed out and the shine they shine with is love.

People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.

Is happiness the aim?" "I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good

If the stone falls hard enough the ripples last a lifetime.

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don't get away with anything.

People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide shops in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.

William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of all time. He has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

He smiled softly. "People you love never die." I had no idea of the sense of his words, but they stayed with me for centuries.

Your life will have 25,000 days in it. Make sure you remember some of them.

Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married or they don't get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realize they would have done it the same, and then they die.

You'll be cool when you're dead.

History is people. Everyone loves history.' Daphne looks at me doubtfully, her face retreating into her neck as her eyebrows rise. 'Are you sure about that?' I offer a small nod. 'It's just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time.

And yet the irony was that she soon placed herself in the margins voluntarily, giving up work for family, because she imagined that when she eventually arrived at her deathbed, she would feel more regret about unborn children than unwritten books.

What is legacy but the most empty and mediocre substitute for what we have. Steel and money and fancy concert halls don't give you immortality.

When you die the last thing you want is for your death to leak out and infect those left behind, for those loved ones to become a kind of living dead. And yet, inevitably, that often happens.

The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.