Quotes About Legacy

There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same--fleeting and unknowable--for every one of us. I lived.

If you legitimize their self-centeredness, they'll be more likely to forget about their ancestors, their fellow citizens, or their descendants.

We never sleep. What will happen when all grandmas run out of fire? We can't die. We die, nobody take care of you.

Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.

Hopefully, I'll be remembered as the person who brought an end to Christianity.

All lives are stories, and history is made of stories.

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

My grandfather once told her if you couldn't read with cold feet, there wouldn't be a literate soul in the state of Maine.

He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father's house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole like has come down to this moment. That he has answered his father's prayers.

And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having.

Though I must say all this has given me a new glimpse of the ongoingness of the world. We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable.

In eternity people's lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either.

He was the measure of the failure of his father's body, and also perhaps a portending of the failure of his own.~

It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.

Oh, I am a limited man, and old, and he will still be his inexplicable mortal self when I am dust.

So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensational.

It still amazes me every time I think of it. I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.

Il arrive que ce que les morts laissent en partant nous apprenne sur eux des choses qu'ils ne nous auraient jamais dites de leur vivant.

Lagrange was born in Turin (now Italy), but his family was partly French ancestry on his father's side, who was originally wealthy, managed to squander all the family's fortune in speculations, leaving his son with no inheritance. Later in life, Lagrange described this economic catastrophe as the best thing that had ever happened to him: Had I inherited a fortune I would probably not have cast my lot with mathematics.

While Euclid himself may not have been the greatest mathematician who ever lived, he was certainly the greatest teacher of mathematics.