Quotes About Legacy

She felt the breath of history on her cheek.

They carried him not to bury him:They carried him down to crown him….The poet flourished here, disheveled,Who would not bow before votive lampsBut to the common spade.

It is a sad fact that all flesh must die, but there is no reason why one's story, as well as one's soul, should be slighted after the passage. The attraction artists feel for our cemeteries is only partly aesthetic; much of it is gossip, a continual whisper intended for the delighted ear. Marble without a story is just marble. A true monument leans over and murmurs in your ear.

Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.

The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.

Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.

The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.

Alexander's mere name and the fame of his feats raised rulers and realms across virtually the whole world. And those who kept control of even the slightest slice of his huge heritage were reckoned most renowned.

Alexander emerges as an almost Hamlet-like figure, more sinned against than sinning. In a sense Alexander, too, was haunted and motivated by his father's ghost... He may well have saved more lives than he destroyed and was rarely gratuitous in the use of violence... his legacy is enormous. He was the founder of the Hellenistic Age, which in turn has bequeathed us the foundations of our modern art, science and culture.

As a reviewer once told me, the story of Alexander's tomb without a body is like Hamlet without the Prince…. The rest is silence.

William Shakespeare

It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition.

The problem with people like us is that we don't die properly.

Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver, and the idea of leaving behind an everlasting legacy can spur even the most cautious person to proceed recklessly.

Sometimes love outlasts even death.

Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren't the 'life,''body,' and 'face' of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?

Earth writes its history with one hand and erases it with the other, and as we go further back in time, erasure gains the upper hand.

Two more decades would pass before I discovered, almost by chance, that my own great-grandfather had been a Klansman.

The Rice family owned more slaves than most other families in the vicinity of Warrensburg, and on August 13, 1862, the family fortunes suffered a severe blow.

Although that interest is partly gone, I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. I

Can one waste a life?

When the American novelist Howard Sturgis lay on his deathbed he was cared for so solicitously by his life partner that at one point Sturgis had to remind him, "A watched pot never boils"—surely one of the wittiest comments ever made while dying, unless you consider what the socialite Drue Heinz said when nearing the end—"They won't even let you take a book"—or the emperor Vespasian, who remarked on his deathbed, "I think I am turning into a god.

One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today's civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories — "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" — a blessing is always a mixed blessing. As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades. (pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges")