Quotes About Legacy

I have spent most of my life most happily in making plans for others to carry out.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

If he had wished, he could have annexed Denmark; and ended a thousand years of war and history. But Charles had no weaknesses; now and thereafter he was behaving out of a book. The first maxim of Alexanderism is never to stop; Charles continued.

They, whether steel kings or Bonapartes, cannot, after a certain age, endure solitude. For it is the solitude, even though strictly relative in the majority of cases, that kills them, or sends them on the road to Waterloo.

reason, say the elders, was so that you and future generations would not have to carry the pain.

Pardon, old fathers.

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.

On limestone quarried near the spotBy his command these words are cut:Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!

Was it for this the wild geese spreadThe gray wing upon every tide;For this that all that blood was shed,For this Edward Fitzgerald died,And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,All that delirium of the brave?Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

Come let us mock at the greatThat had such burdens on the mindAnd toiled so hard and lateTo leave some monument behind,Nor thought of the leveling wind.

That is no country for old men. The youngIn one another's arms, birds in the trees—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten, born, and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,And nodding by the fire, take down this book.

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone It's with O' Leary in the grave (September 1913)

The living can assist the imagination of the dead...

Both men lost speech in their last days and hours. Both died at age sixty-three, Lee long since weary of life, and Grant ready to live it again. Their war made them national icons, and their war reputations dictated the balance of their lives, careers, and posterity.

You have been speaking about William Carey. When I am gone, say nothing about William Carey-speak only about Willam Carey's Saviour.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

No wreaths please—especially no hothouse flowers.Some common memento is better,something he prized and is known by:his old clothes—a few books perhaps.

Toil for the brave! The brave that are no more.

My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

The past is now like a charnel-house, where the dead do but bury the dead.

So live, that when thy summons comes to joinThe innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm, where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death,Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothedBy an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one that wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." Thanatopsis