Quotes About Legacy

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.

This is life. It's not a dress rehearsal. If we don't do this now, we may as well start planning our own funerals.

Posterity is not kind to mathematicians who make errors.

That we wouldn't be able to do. Not even if we wanted it more than anything in the world. Because once we've touched a world, it stays touched.

There is no preparation for a good death but a good life.

It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth.

When I was younger, I wasn't concentrating on good days. I was managing a career and trying to have a good year. It would always 'lead' to something, which never leads to anything except death, where everything leads to. And then as I got older, and then I had my kids and everything, I began to appreciate a great Wednesday.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance.

Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity.

When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

My dad was great. He was very droll, very dry.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.

In the last generation, this country produced one of the most eminent men of science in the whole world. His name was quite unknown among us while he lived, and it is still unknown. Yet I may say without too great exaggeration that when I heard it mentioned in a professional assembly in the Netherlands two years ago, everybody got down under the table and touched their foreheads to the floor. His name was Josiah Willard Gibbs .

Nor was his point that the meek shall inherit the earth. His point was that no man could inherit the earth, that the only thing worth inheriting is humanity.

Sunnybank Gray Dawn outlived all the Little People I have spoken of—except Tippy—in this book. Dawn was the last of the great Sunnybank collies. He died on May 30, 1929, leaving bitter heartaches behind him. Peace to his white soul!)

Some proverbs live because they are too true to die. Others endure because they have a smug sound and nobody has bothered to bury them.