Quotes About Legacy

vive deprisa, muere joven

Do not live as if you have ten thousand years left. Your fate hangs over you. While you are still living, while you still exist on this Earth, strive to become a genuinely great person." —Marcus Aurelius, Roman

When you are born, you cried while others laughed around you, likewise make others cry when you are dead.

We take life so seriously. But at the end, the billionaire gets buried next to the street sweeper.

You'll get to the end of your life anyway-- why not reach that place as an extraordinary human being?

One of the saddest things in life is to get to the end and look back in regret, knowing that you could have been, done, and had so much more.

This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.

Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.

Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right.

The flesh of my body Is nothing in my longing. What you think I want Will be pure dust after hundreds of years and something from me be crying to something from you High up in their air.

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

Her granny was asleep and Mary knew it was special, this trip. It was something that hadn't been planned. It was actually impossible. Four generations of women--I'm a woman, Mary said to herself--heading off on a journey in a car. One of them dead, one of them dying, one of them driving, one of them just starting out.

We can't choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.

It is a commonplace to identify Martin Luther as the 'father of individualism'.

As for the fall of the Spanish Empire, ironically, perhaps no monarchs in history were more conscientious, honest, or hardworking than Charles V and his son Philip II. Between them they carefully built the Spanish Empire and ruled it for more than eighty years. Nearly every day they rose early and worked diligently at administering this sprawling entity. Had they been wastrels or playboys, they might have done much less damage to the economies in their charge.

That the Catholic Church finally thrives in Latin America could be considered as partly a gift from Martin Luther.

As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, "to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant."60

Russia is a country with unpredictable past.

so that age and subsequent generation always go on destroying and spoiling what went before:

Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.

The other Bonds were not wrong in the role (even Lazenby has his defenders), but they were not Connery, and that was their cross to bear.

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.

Poor kid, I thought, to do this to yourself at twenty-three and leave a note that tells me you could have been a writer. I would have liked that for you. I would have liked that very much.

Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.