Quotes About Legacy

Success for me is whether you have created something that you can be really proud of.

Steve did not have a death wish. He had the exact opposite. His appetite for life was so strong, it outweighed all fear. So what if his choices shortened his life? His choices filled his life, and enriched the lives of those around him.

all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds.

To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.

When Marshall died in 1835, he and the Court he led had rebuked two presidents, Congress, and a dozen states and laid down principles of law and politics that still apply.

Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.

And long after the history of all the big things that make the front pages are forgotten, what God has done through you and a few people will be history.

Almost universally, when people look back on their lives while on their deathbed [...] they wish they had spent more time with the people and activities they truly loved and less time worrying about aspects of life that, upon deeper examination, really don't matter at all that much. Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes.

The key to a good life is this: If you're not going to talk about something during the last hour of your life, then don't make it a top priority during your lifetime.

The sergeant's account of his past was ancient in its form and confusingly dramatic, as perhaps would have been a game of three-level chess between Richard Burbage and Sacha Guitry.

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the "court histories" that sprang up after the president's assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the same young musicians who stood in awe of Bill Monroe were about to push him, and others like him, off the stage. Rock 'n' roll began to take the youth audience away from country music. And that was a disaster.

Bill's father would have remembered the Civil War, and his great-great-grandfather actually fought in the American Revolution.

Of course, the most common response is that Bill Monroe was "the Father of Bluegrass" and its true creator. It was his melding of a band sound around fiddle playing, his high singing, his revolutionary mandolin stylings, and his distinctive surging rhythm that set bluegrass apart from the rest of country or folk music.

The most striking hallmarks of so-called traditional bluegrass were fully defined during the Jimmy Martin years, long after Flatt and Scruggs had left the Blue Grass Boys. If Bill Monroe started bluegrass, Earl Scruggs certainly made it as popular as it is today. But it is crucial to recognize that Monroe was the prime creative organizer and artistic guiding force behind bluegrass.

The first chap we said was loafing, until he died. That's nearly always the verdict on a sailing ship, anyway. A man is invariably 'mouching' until he dies, and then we say, "Oh, he must have been bad after all." --Charles Lightoller

In books I meet the dead as if they were alive in books I see what is yet to come... All things decay and pass in time... All fame would fall into oblivion if God had not given mortal men the book to aid them

Poems and epitaphs are but stuff, Here lies Bob Barras and that's enough.

Here I lie at the Chapel door, Here lie I because I'm poor, The farther in the more you'l pay, Here lie I as warm as they.

Now I am dead and laid in my grave And that my bones are rotten, By this shall I remembered be, Or else I am forgotten.

Let's give some substance to patriotism. It may take a generation.

He loved his family. But he was not proud of them. Their principal achievement was survival. It would take him a lifetime to appreciate what an achievement that was.

We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this? And maybe we remember nothing most of all when we put our hands on our hearts and carry on about not forgetting.

There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.