Quotes About Legacy

How convenient it would be to many of our great men and great families of doubtful origin, could they have the privilege of the heroes of yore, who, whenever their origin was involved in obscurity, modestly announced themselves descended from a god.

I wish to impress these matters upon you, because you are the eldest of your father's family. The oldest son should consider himself the second father of the family.

Washington Irving

Washington Irving

Washington Irving

Washington Irving

Washington Irving

Washington Irving

New eras don't come about because of swords, they're created by the people who wield them.

If today's churches, companies and organizations want to be thriving tomorrow, they have an obligation to coach and mentor the new generation of leaders.

Waylon Jennings

The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, 24 summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games.

So long as breath remains in our lungs, untapped potential lies inside us, waiting to be released. The reason we are still alive is that we are carrying something inside us that this generation needs. That's why we're not yet in heaven.

Captain Thomas Walduck in 1708 neatly summarized the development of the West Indies: "Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.

Dead heroes do nothing to protect their people tomorrow.

Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.

They will put that on my gravestone. 'Here lies Tinker, her heart was in the right place, but her foot was in her mouth and god knows where her brain went.

They think that the past is dead. They don't see that the past is just the beginning of the future.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. (Actually appearing as "a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children" in _The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge_, published 1971)

To be as good as our fathers we must be better, imitation is not discipleship.

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist; Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.