Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Legacy.
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
Thomas Carlyle
If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
February 13, 1951. No! I cannot claim that with the end of this notebook, of the notebook, all will be settled, that all will have been done. Perhaps I will have the desire to add to this again. To add something. To add. Perhaps. To add to this again at the last momenthttp://www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/textes/gide_ang.rtf
Andre Gide, the source for this
That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.
Benjamin Franklin
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the last generation.
Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual M
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry Kissinger
Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.
Augusto Roa Bastos
I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.
Kurt Cobain
Once in Persia reigned a kingWho upon his signet ringGraved a maxim true and wise,Which he held before the eyesGave him counsel at a glanceFit for every change and chance.Solemn words, and these are they:Even this shall pass away.
Theodore Tilton, The King's Ring
There ain't nothing that breaks up homes, country, and nations like somebody publishing their memoirs.
Will Rogers
When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do -- well, that's Memoirs.
All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.
Dorothy Parker
I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.
Oscar Wilde
Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
Horace
Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.
John L. Motley
Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
I suppose that everyone of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
A.A. (Alan Alexandra) Milne
When my journal appears, many statues must come down.
Duke of Wellington Arthur Welles
The remarkable thing is that it is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks. The empty life has even its few details blurred, and cannot be remembered with certainty.
Eric Hoffer
