Quotes About Legacy

The pre-Easter Jesus is dead and gone; he's nowhere anymore. This statement does not deny Easter in any way, but simply recognizes that the corpuscular Jesus, the flesh-and-blood Jesus, is a figure of the past.

The slave ships are ghost ships still sailing around the edges of our modern consciousness. Their legacy in the present is discrimination, deep poverty, structural inequality, and premature death.

Amicitiae nostrae memoriam spero sempiternam fore

For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

Did not he, then, who, if he had died at that time, would have died in all his glory, owe all the great and terrible misfortunes into which he subsequently fell to the prolongation of his life at that time?

being asked by Criton how he would be buried, "I have taken a great deal of pains," saith he, "my friends, to no purpose, for I have not convinced our Criton that I shall fly from hence, and leave no part of me behind. Notwithstanding, Criton, if you can overtake me, wheresoever you get hold of me, bury me as you please: but

El pasado es también el presente y el futuro. La nación que olvida está pérdida.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I worked with Diodotus the Stoic, who made his residence in my house, and after a life of long intimacy died there only a short time ago.

Vita enim mortuorum in memoria est posita vivorum.

As I gazed rather intently at the earth my grandfather said: How long will your thoughts continue to dwell upon the earth?

A wise man's life is all one preparation for death.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

When any civilization is dust and ashes, he said, art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning—human meaning, that is—is defined by them. You have to admit that.

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

In the end, we'll all become stories. Or else we'll become entities. Maybe it's the same.

Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.