Quotes About Monuments

Granite from New Hampshire has been used in construction at Arlington National Cemetery, the Library of Congress, New York's Brooklyn Bridge, and Civil War monuments throughout the country.

I went to Newport not long ago, to see the great stone fin-de-siècle "cottages" in which certain rich Americans once summered. The places loom still along Bellevue Avenue and Cliff Walk, one after another, silk curtains frayed but gargoyles intact, monuments to something beyond themselves; houses built, clearly, to some transcendental point. No one had made clear to me exactly what that point was.

On the whole "the critics" distrust great wealth, but "the public" does not. On the whole "the critics" subscribe to the romantic view of man's possibilities, but "the public" does not. In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least.

He liked Washington, the "subdued elegance" of Sixteenth Street and the extravagance of Massachusetts Avenue, the simplicity of the monuments, the lack of pretension.

Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him alive again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments--he who laughed at monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains--nothing but words, precisely.

Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air. Watching weather clarified his thinking. Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams.

world and time erases not just memories but entire civilizations, reducing everyone and every monument to dust. The only thing that survives is love, for it is an energy as enduring as light, which travels outward from its source toward the ever-expanding boundaries of the universe, the very energy of which all things were conceived and with which all things will be sustained in

1984, when it presented its findings at a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder.*" [*See Hoagland's The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever.]

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

The proud monuments of liberty knew that… governments were only concerned about the actions and conduct of man, and not his speculative notions. Who among us feels himself so exalted above his fellows, as to have a right to dictate to them their mode of belief?

and the onion-shaped minarets of Persepolis in the distance.

People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites - let's say the sites around Iran - where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.

Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?

People who worship only themselves get a slick, polished look...like monuments. Too bad they had to go so soon.

People should have freedom in their pilgrimages and tours. They should come and visit historical monuments and sites - let's say the sites around Iran - where they can easily engage in wide- scale contacts with others.

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

Pride is a by-product of insecurity. And the more insecure a person is, the more monuments they need to build. There is a fine line between 'Thy kingdom come' and 'my kingdom come.' If you cross the line, your relationship with God is self-serving. You aren't serving God. You are using God. You aren't building altars to God. You are building monuments to yourself.

Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future

The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

I am nothing special of this I am sure. I am just a common man with common thoughts. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, that has always been enough.

I understood monuments now. Some were built of stone and sweat, and others were built of dreams, but they were all made of the things we didn't want to forget.

Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at present wandering along the roads of Europe. Thousands of innocent people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are doomed to poverty and hunger.

We] cannot and should not expect to rediscover the full body of ancient wisdom by studying dusty monuments and myths full of idioms and subtle references understood only by those who lived at the time. The perennial wisdom requires each individual and age to discover it anew in external mathematics, expressing it in ways and symbols suitable for those times and cultures.

Gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in the old Transvaal during the nineteenth century, and modern Johannesburg still has within its boundaries the huge white mine dumps that look like mini mountains. While the mine dumps were on the outskirts of the town years ago, the suburbs have since expanded around them and they lie there like monuments to a golden era.