Quotes About Legacy

But I never think about dead people. Looking at these old graves makes me think how generation after generation of the same family are all gathered together. And that makes me think about how life goes on, but not about dying. I never think about dying.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for the dying.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented ; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked - and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people. Later still this specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y.

The tombstones are not very different from those in other European cemeteries. Many record the deaths of several generations: the name, the year of birth, the day of death and the place of death, if it was not on the island. A name and two dates, the last one precise to the very day. This is what is recorded. About what happened between, apart from the bare fact of survival, not a word is written.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill

When a parent dies, for those left behind it can feel as though half the sky has fallen. My father was the sheltering sky, and beneath his mild firmament no storm ever raged, no hard rain fell.

Their lost voices Must continue to be heard.

My brother Henry must heir the land, My brother Frank must be at his command; Whilst I, poor Jack, will do that That all the world will wonder at!

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

We live in the shadow of a great lie, and by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have become irrelevant consumers, and a new generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great chain of shopping.

Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

You will die, and I, and all we can create—why not a city? But if there is one thing that deserves to be immortal, it is knowledge.

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, but to live a life without purpose or meaning.

We can pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

The second certainty is associated with spirit, as in Pasternak's novel, Dr. Zhivago, when the physician says to a young woman dying of cancer, "Your spirit will live on, you know. Your spirit is you in others, others in you.

My great-grandfather was but a water-man, looking one way, and rowing another.

My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.

Literature is an investment of genius which has dividends to all subsequent times.

The best way to prepare for death is to live life to its fullest.