Quotes About Legacy

To write for posterity* is not to worry whether they will read us tomorrow. It is to aspire to a certain quality of writing. Even when no one reads us. *Posterity is not the whole of future generations. It is a small group of men with taste, a proper upbringing, and erudition, in each generation.

A cultivated soul is one where the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.

Posterity is not going to understand what an achievement mere good sense is in this insane century.

Entweder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Hegels, oder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Schopenhauers. Tertium non datur.

It is indecent, and even obscene, to speak to man of "progress," when every path winds its way up between funerary cypresses.

Wie eine Tradition aufrecht erhalten? Indem man nicht von ihr spricht.

When the dust raised by the great events of modern history settles, the mediocrity of the protagonists leaves the historian dumbfounded.

Civilizations are mortal" is the greatest comfort for someone alive today.

Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of industrial society.

Everything that interrupts a tradition obliges us to start over. And every origin is bloody .

He followed in his father's footsteps, but his gait was somewhat erratic.

It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy, you know. Killers, even.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead. [last words]

At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.

It's always best to look ahead and not backwards. Possessions are not important. Think of those beautiful porcelain pieces I had. Before they came to me, they had all passed through the hands of many people, surviving wars and natural disasters. I got them only because someone else lost them. While I had them, I enjoyed them; now some other people will enjoy them. Life itself is transitory. Possessions are not important.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Fair Maiden Lilliard lies under this stane, Little was her stature but great was her fame; Upon the English loons she laid many thumps, And when her legs were cuttied off she fought upon her stumps.

That Great Cocktail Cabinet in the Sky...

However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.

One thing that was passed on from generation to generation in my family, over seven generations in 200 years, was never give up. That's the way we live.

There are still some people who think that we have Stalin to thank for all our progress, who quake before Stalin's dirty underdrawers, who stand at attention and salute them.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev

i hope i die warmed by the life that i tried to live

MY BLACK ME My father fed me Invisible Man, Native Son, No Longer at Ease, Black Man's Burden, and the more I read, the madder I got, and I already had reason to scream, but my father kept me dreaming of what words I might bring to the world.