Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Legacy.
There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.
Source Unknown
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Oc
I have a spelling checkerIt came with my PC;It plainly marks four my revueMistakes I cannot sea.I've run this poem threw it,I'm sure your pleased too no,Its letter perfect in its weigh,My checker tolled me sew.
Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
Oscar Wilde
There will be some trouble about 'biography' because I have never troubled myself to supply particulars of my early life to any writer.
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching...
Paul A. Samuelson
I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
Rene Descartes
Even if I was well - I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.http://englishhistory.net/keats/letters/brawnefebruary1820.html
John Keats, Letter to Fanny Braw
Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two.
Ellery Sedgwick
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
George Orwell
The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.
Leon Edel
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard Feynman
Your descendants shall gather your fruits.
Virgil, Eclogues, no. 9, l. 50 (
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp
Biography is a higher gossip.
Robert Winder
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
Virginia Woolf
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
The record of one's life must needs prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.
Sister Elizabeth Kenny
If the reviewing of books be... an ungentle craft, the making of them is, for the most part, a dishonest one -- and that department of literature which ought to be entrusted to those only who are distinguished for their moral qualities is, not infrequently, in the hands of authors totally devoid of good taste, good feeling, and generous sentiment. The writers of Lives have, in our time, assumed a license not enjoyed by their more scrupulous predecessors -- for they interweave the adventures of the living with the memoirs of the dead; and, pretending to portray the peculiarities which sometimes mark the man of genius, they invade the privacy and disturb the peace of his surviving associates.
John Cam Hobhouse
