Quotes About Legacy

SMITH TREASURE," she read softly. "It was the kids, right? That's what they were trying to say. In the house. Everywhere. The SMITH TREASURE was the kids.

Old writers never die, they just decom-prose!

Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.

People weren't firecrackers who burst into the night sky with brilliance and glory, and a moment later faded away to nothing. Our souls had to be more lasting than that.

Death isn't a tragedy," he continued. "Death is merely a step to something better. The tragedy is a life misspent. Yours wasn't." Misspent? It hardly seemed spent at all. "But I didn't get a chance to do anything important." "You learned to love and to forgive. That is a life well spent." The

You're middle-aged, Daddy. What are you going to do with the second half of your life? Because, I'm telling you now, if you run through all of your money before you're eighty, don't come looking to me for a handout 'cuz I'll just put you in an old folks' home and go party.

What is clear is that genius, whether it is represented by a Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein or an Alberto Ramirez, leaves the world a better place.

IN APRIL, I. M. PEI turned one hundred. His adult children had a party for him on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel. Talk about "It was an older crowd.

We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once.

Death has no repeal. It is a brute ending that leaves us the legacy of an inscrutable silence. Therefore, I understand the voice of mercy very well.

The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.

Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.

as a general proposition, until very recently, vice presidents have always been excluded because it is unsettling to have someone around you whose happiest moment will be when you drop dead.

Harry Truman had no middle name, just an initial "S," which was a reference to his two grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman.

I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.

Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.

I want a billion people to know my name as well as they know their own. I want to clone myself to fame.

I want my kids to have the things in life that I never had when I was growing up. Things like beards and chest hair.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Of women who choose not to have children, most are undermothered and fear they won't know how. Sometimes they fear they will "mess up" their kids like they feel they have been messed up. (Although let's not forget that there are other important reasons someone may choose not to become a parent.)

Macon has such a rich musical history - and the state of Georgia, as well.

My goal is to get another 30 years out of this business. So I need to figure out the fuel to do that. And so far, I think it's respect and quality and company, not celebrity or box office or stardom. It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.

I feel like so much has been left undone. There are friends I won't see before I leave, there are bills I still need to pay. I haven't written as much as I've wanted, and there are countless things I've said that I wish I could correct, but this is a process that will never end. When my grandmother died she left a library full of books she never finished reading. This is how I feel now.

To those who had a chance to watch them both work, the minds of William and Elizebeth appeared equally amazing and equally incomprehensible. Their brains were Easter Island statues, stony and imposing.