Quotes About Legacy

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.

To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir. And—pushing one step farther in these mists—may they not have decided even better than they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?

For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy.

Remember that we must all die: all these personal relations we try to live by are temporary. I used to feel death selected people, it is a notion one gets from novels, because some of the characters are usually left talking at the end. Now 'death spares no one' begins to be real.

To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir.

Oniton, like herself, was imperfect. Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous. It, too, had suffered in the border warfare between the Anglo-Saxon and the Kelt, between things as they are and as they ought to be.

If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No--perhaps not even that. Without their spirit life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.

It is well to be remembered with love. It is not so very dreadful to be forgotten entirely. But if we shall resent anything on earth at all, we shall resent the consecration of a deserted room.

Money was the fruit of self-denial, and the second generation had a right to profit by the self-denial of the first

Es läuft also darauf hinaus. Es hat immer Leute wie mich gegeben, und es wird sie weiterhin geben und meistens sind sie verfolgt worden.

There's never any knowing—(how am I to put it?)—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever.

i never knew anyone so relentless to his ancestors - you make up for your soapiness toward the living

We may not know the whole story in our lifetime. (On assassination of President John F Kennedy(

The fastest way for a politician to become an elder statesman is to lose an election.

Isn't it a shame that future generations can't be here to see all the wonderful things we're doing with their money?

And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places--that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead--still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on--to something distant as the sun. And still would he be part of it all, through the eager lives of his children.

He saw each of his daughters, part of himself. And he remembered what Judith had said: 'You will live on in our children's lives.' And he began to get glimmerings of a new immortality, made up of generations, an endless succession of other lives extending into the future.

I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.

I do not have an act. I just do Eartha Kitt... I want to be whoever Eartha Kitt is until the gods take me wherever they take me.

The stage floor was a stage of thin ice for me to tread. To hold my own or to sink through and die, never to be remembered.

Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a great store of gold.

You are indispensable until your work on earth is done.