Legacies Quotes

“Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

“Fake friends; those who only drill holes under your boat to get it leaking; those who discredit your ambitions and those who pretend they love you, but behind their backs they know they are in to destroy your legacies.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the dream

“With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.”
― Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

“I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world."

[Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]”
― George Whitman

“His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.”
― Patrick White, Voss

“so many people live and they only live and die; so many people live and they truly live and die”
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

“No one will remember us, out footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children's children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss.”
― Aberjhani, Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

“Legacies are not just for legends. Whether a million people know your name, or only one person does, you still have the right to leave your mark on the world, even if it’s only in your tiny corner of it, in the tiniest of ways.

Not all of us will achieve great heights and feats. Most of us will never leave our hometown or country, let alone conquer Everest. And you know what? That’s okay.

Because real life is what happens in between moments of greatness. It’s the little things that at the end of it all, you realize were greater than the sum of their parts. It’s the amount of times you laughed, or cried, danced, sang, created, inspired, and made someone smile.

The best kind of legacies are the ones that are unseen. You’ll never fully be able to measure the effect of a smile or a kind word, but I promise you, the most whispered phrase can send a shockwave around the world that lasts for centuries, or even an eternity.”
― A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers

“My great-grandmama told my grandma the part she lived through that my grandma didn't live through and my grandma told my mama what they both didn't live through and my mama told me.”
― Gayl Jones, Corregidora

“Strive to leave a legacy beyond your limitations and far beyond the expectations of others.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I think of Barthes again. A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

...I change, embellish, and preserve you all at once.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because nothing was sacred. Not in this world. Not in stones. Not in trees. Not in legacies. Certainly not in love.”
― A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly

“It is my wish and most cherished hope that God would be pleased with my legacy, that lives would be changed by it, and that the world would be immeasurably better because I was privileged to leave a legacy at all. And if perchance I am fortunate enough to have these things come to pass, I can then rest in the fact that I have lived well.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Take the stones that failure throws at you and build legacies the world will always remember you for.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You

“If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Show the world you are not here to just pass through. Leave great footprints wherever you pass and be remembered for the change you initiated.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You

“Would people be excited about your departure from the earth or they would wish you should come back again and again if possible?”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts

“There is much tradition and mystique in the bequest of personal weapons to a surviving comrade in arms. It has to do with a continuation of values past individual mortality. People living in a time made safe for them by others may find this difficult to understand.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Legacies are hard to come by, after all. And if you have one going, you ought to do what you can to keep it alive.”
― Philip Gulley, Just Shy of Harmony

“The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“They're funny things, legacies are. They can make a person's good-doings extend beyond his or her lifetime, and burden everyone else around who's related to live up to or better it. But they're always very important to maintain to the best of one's ability because that's as close to immortality one can get.”
― Lauren Lola, An Absolute Mind

“And you're here...oh we're in hell.”
― Hope Mikaelson

“One of the legacies we can pass on to children is wisdom and understanding to look beyond their fears and craving for social acceptance.”
― Asuni LadyZeal

“Men and women who are genius at what they know, understand and do, content to experience the tragedy of going through life as a light placed under a table if you will...a dimmable, hidden, and unknown legend.

The day that special person makes the wisdom decision, to hire another genius skilled to unveil, and strategically hail that cloaked legend...legacy can lay its foundation as a forever cornerstone.”
― Lady Tracey Bond DoubleOHHSeven™

“Seize the moment, because one silly act can create a legacy, and also birth a legend.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Legacies are footprints of legends who walked among men.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Writing history is a relay, which is also true of history itself. We build, if we can, on the legacies that are left us.”
― Steve Inskeep, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America

“It seems to her that most of what she's done in her life has been of this ilk. Projects, ultimately inconsequential. Who have they helped?”
― Margaret Atwood, Old Babes in the Wood: Stories