Quotes About Legacy

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men around to his opinion twenty years later.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.

See how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own ends, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.

1842  Son Waldo (age 5) dies of scarlet fever.  Journalist Walt Whitman (age 23) attends Emerson's lecture on poetry in New York City. In his report for the New York Aurora, Whitman writes that it was the "richest and most beautiful" lecture he'd ever heard. On the same New York trip, Emerson becomes godfather to newborn William James, son of his friend, Henry James, Sr.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Es tan malo, entonces, el ser mal interpretado? Pitágoras fue mal interpretado, y lo fueron Sócrates, Jesús, Lutero y Galileo, y lo fueron todos los espíritus puros y graves que han honrado a la humanidad. Ser grande es ser mal comprendido.

I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and

Cada hombre auténtico es una causa, un país, y una era.

I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

Dónde está el maestro que enseñó a Shakespeare? ¿Dónde el que enseñó a Franklin, a Washington, a Bacon, a Newton? Todo gran hombre es único.

that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names.

In India, the sapling was planted by the nation's founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.

If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.

You gave us a lawyer; we gave you back a Mahatma.

To whom does this body belong? To the one that feeds it, the mother and father who bring it into being, to the master that buys its services, to the fire that consumes it finally, or to the dogs that gnaw its bones after the fire has done its work?

It is a waste of your precious time on earth to do everything you do—personally and professionally—and not leave something behind that makes the world a better place.

What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.