Quotes About Legacy

And just as in life, if a man imagines himself on his deathbed and then works back through the years of his life, he will make better decisions along the way, knowing the end. Or at the very least, hell spend his time more wisely.

The mother shaped the mission of the family, and if she failed, the family failed with her.

tradition, properly cared for, nurtured, honored, and respected, continues to feed the soul of a family.

Who would tell the story of the elephant when she was gone? A family was only as strong as their stories.

And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.

By the sword you did your work, and by the sword you die.

Bethink thee of the adage, 'Call none blest, till peaceful death have crowned a life of weal.

In the good days remember also death.

The ultimate affront, that neither hurries, grows weary nor forgets, is called death.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

We can't afford inaction any longer, and, frankly, there's just no excuse for it. We all want the same thing: for our children and the generations after them to inherit a clean and beautiful planet capable of supporting a healthy human civilization. That goal should transcend politics.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.

We gaan in op reusachtige, ongrijpbare collectieve projecten, zodat we ons afvragen wat we vorig jaar deden, sterker nog, waar wij zijn gebleven en wat er van ons geworden is. We zien onze verspilde krachten onder ogen tijdens het pathos van een pensioneringsfeestje.

But the museum is only a prelude to a life well lived.

that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality.

How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object — whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug — and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years..

When dead she would exist only in the memories of people. She, who had never been subject to anyone would now be on the par with everybody else. Reading could not change that. Though writing might.