Quotes About Legacy

Sometimes the trail you leave behind you is more important than the path ahead of you.

Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!

On the occasion of a visit to Jane Austen's childhood home in Steventon, Hampshire: "I put my hand down on Jane's desk and bring it up covered with dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me! One would have imagined the devoted female custodian going round with her duster at least every other day.

Yet there was no reason why one's death should not, in its own way, be as elegant as one's life, and one would do everything possible to make it so.

The legends on the tombstones are eventually worn away as the stone is eroded by rain and wind and centuries. Better to slip away quietly after having lived as fully as one can, doing the very best one can with the gifts one has been given.

Maybe not. But maybe that's how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.

Let's end the notion that ideas have no value unless they turn into a business or have some other practical use. Save them all in a beautiful book like Leonardo did. You might want to give them away someday, perhaps to someone who needs an idea. Or your great-great-grandchildren might love knowing what a fascinating mind you had. Or your biographer might be very happy after you're gone.

If you were on your deathbed, looking back at your life, what would make you feel happiest and most satisfied with how you lived?

Priceless things matter not for their value, but because they offer us an enduring reminder of stability and permanence.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.

Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

The French right wing, opening the offensive into German-occupied Lorraine, took an old embattled path like so many in France and Belgium where, century after century, whatever the power that makes men fight brought legions tramping down the same roads, leveling the same villages.

Revolutions produce other men, not new men. Halfway between truth and endless error, the mold of the species is permanent. That is Earth's burden.

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

Books are carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows of the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.

Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled. The

the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.

the inadvertent by-product of the nobles' passionate pursuit of war.

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience.