Quotes About Legacy

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.

Why should the generations overlap one another at all?  Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? About

The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

When I'm long dead and gone, people will be falsely attributing made-up quotes to me on internet pages and memes.

Never see a wretched little heavy-eyed mite sitting on the edge of a chair against your study wall without saying to yourselves, "perhaps this boy is he who, if I am not careful, will one day tell the world what manner of man I was." If even two or three schoolmasters learn this lesson and remember it, the preceding chapters will not have been written in vain.

At other times when not quite well he would have them in for the fun of shaking his will at them. He would in his imagination cut them all out one after another and leave his money to found almshouses, till at last he was obliged to put them back, so that he might have the pleasure of cutting them out again the next time he was in a passion.

certain kind of good fortune generally attends self-made men to the last. It is their children of the first, or first and second, generation who are in greater danger, for the race can no more repeat its most successful performances suddenly and without its ebbings and flowings of success than the individual can do so, and the more brilliant the success in any one generation, the greater as a general rule the subsequent exhaustion until time has been allowed for recovery.

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.

These are the arks, the trophies, I erect,That fortify thy name against old age.

O blessed Letters, that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all: By you we doe conferre with who are gone, And the dead-living unto councell call: By you th' unborne shall have communion Of what we feele, and what doth us befall.

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

When house and land are gone and spent, then learning is most excellent.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead

Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, until the world will be sorry that you retire.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.

He left the name at which the world grew pale,To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

The father of English criticism.

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

It is neither cowardice nor betrayal to insist that the Enlightenment's main lesson is to be mindful of how much it has left its inheritors to figure out.

Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.