Quotes About Legacy

Venus herself graced their marriage with her presence, but what happened after that we do not know, except that Pygmalion named the maiden Galatea, and that their son, Paphos, gave his name to Venus' favorite city.

He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.

And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.

There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.

I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: 'Please give me Edith Wharton's book'; and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read!

The Hazeldean heart was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and took it savagely.

no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.

For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction.

Sir Helmsley lo accusava di sottoporsi al lavoro solo per amore dell'avventura; ma, benché addolorato per la decisione presa dal figlio, lo rispettava per avervi tenuto fede. «Io stesso sono stato tutto un brillante fallimento», aveva borbottato alla fine della loro discussione; e Guy di rimando, ridendo: «Allora cercherò di essere un tetro successo».

After all there was good in the old ways...there was good in the new order too.

After all, there was good in the old ways.

Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn.

Society is indeed a contract ... it becomes a participant not only between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

he was, indeed, arrived at that pitch of greatness, that the means of his ruin could only be found in his own family.

Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, "a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip." The

More clearly than almost any other statesman he beheld the grandeur of the nation loom up, vast and shadowy, through the coming years.

confidently, "President

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew.

GOE, little booke: thy selfe present, As child whose parent is unkent, To him that is the president Of noblesse and of chevalree:

a mortal thing so to immortalize

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that's the only "immortality" we'll ever know on this dying planet.