Quotes About Legacy

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.

Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.

Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

I want to be all used up when I die.

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

Cuando muera, quiero estar completamente agotado. Pues cuanto más duramente trabajo, más vivo. Gozo de la vida por la vida misma. Para mí la vida no es una pequeña vela. Es una especie de antorcha espléndida que por el momento sostengo, con fuerza, y quiero que arda con el mayor brillo posible antes de entregarla a las futuras generaciones.

Reminds me of something my grandfather would say. He'd say, I'm goin' upstairs to fuck your grandmother. He was an honest man, and he wasn't going to bullshit a four-year-old.

As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up.

Everyone should try to scratch their name on the bomb of life.

This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little Styrofoam. Maybe. A little Styrofoam. The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

Every gold piece you save is a slave to work for you. Every copper it earns is its child that also can earn for you. If you would become wealthy, then what you save must earn, and it's children must earn, that all may help to give to you the abundance you crave

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry—the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—"Such as I am, she will shortly be.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.

The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them forward.

As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.

would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestors ought to have been hanged instead of him.

the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy—Such as I am, she will shortly be.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.