50 Timeless Legacy Quotes

In a world that is constantly evolving, the timeless words of those who came before us serve as powerful reminders of the enduring nature of human wisdom and experience. These legacy quotes, passed down through generations, capture profound insights and truths that have remained relevant and inspiring across the ages. In this curated collection of the top 50 timeless legacy quotes, we explore the enduring impact of these eloquent expressions and how they continue to resonate with us today. Whether you're seeking guidance, motivation, or a moment of reflection, let these quotes offer you a source of inspiration that stands the test of time.

1. “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. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” - Ray Bradbury

2. “There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.” - Frank Herbert

3. “This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.” - Victor Hugo

4. “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” - William Shakespeare

5. “We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” - David Brower

6. “How little we understandof the gifts we have been givenor the shape of the pathwe took to reach our salvation.” - Harley King

7. “We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.” - David Brower

8. “We stopped you from going, didn't we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?"Don't be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?" he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he'd made out of a bungalow. "I've been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn't make me happy. Or maybe that's my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I won't have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the book of Job, Job says to God, 'You should've taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer?' Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering.” - Abraham Verghese

9. “The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children” - Philip Carr-Gomm

10. “I grieve and dare not show my discontent, I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,I do, yet dare not say I ever meant, I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate. I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself another self I turned. My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.” - Elizabeth I

11. “The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.” - William Shakespeare

12. “A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?” - George Orwell

13. “The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” - George Orwell

14. “Our days are numbered. One of the primary goals in our lives should be to prepare for our last day. The legacy we leave is not just in our possessions, but in the quality of our lives. What preparations should we be making now? The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day.” - Bill Graham

15. “The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.” - Tavis Smiley

16. “What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?” - Bernhard Schlink

17. “A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.” - CK Webb

18. “You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

19. “Your story is the greatest legacy that you will leave to your friends.It's the longest-lasting legacy you will leave to your heirs.” - Steve Saint

20. “I had an inheritance from my father,It was the moon and the sun.And though I roam all over the world,The spending of it’s never done.” - Ernest Hemingway

21. “My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind” - Jeremy Aldana

22. “Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” - Shannon Alder

23. “Pride and power fall when the person falls, but discoveries of truth form legacies that can be built upon for generations.” - Criss Jami

24. “To seek greatness is the only righteous vengeance.” - Criss Jami

25. “Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.” - Marguerite Yourcenar

26. “Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:The history of how you felt.” - Simon Van Booy

27. “The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it.""But it'd be there.” - James Jones

28. “Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well.” - V. Vee

29. “Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine -- four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit ... my insurance had already been canceled and my driver's license was hanging by a thread.So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head ... but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz ... not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.” - Hunter S. Thompson

30. “Legacy is not what's left tomorrow when you're gone. It's what you give, create, impact and contribute today while you're here that then happens to live on.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

31. “When we let the expectations of others or own unreasonable self-expectations rule, we silence the power of our Legacies.” - Joy DeKok

32. “Create your legacy by fulfilling your potential...” - Gino Norris

33. “Maybe not. But maybe that's how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.” - Barbara Samuel

34. “Perhaps her only legacy would be that she had known something immortal, and while eternity may still belong to God alone, not all things were enslaved by time.” - D. Morgenstern

35. “Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong."~Albert Einstein"Einstein is referring to ones 'legacy' and its intended future recipients as being willfully purposed to benefit them on their journey through this gift of life given to us by God” - R. Alan Woods

36. “My life is an open book; at least this photo album".~R. Alan Woods [2013]” - R. Alan Woods

37. “Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....” - Barack Obama

38. “Everyone is born and they die, but it's the memories they leave behind that define them and let them live on than others.” - Judi Fennell

39. “You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors.” - Johnnie Dent Jr.

40. “As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?” - Criss Jami

41. “Only the passionate were immortal, it seemed. If you fought, screwed, screamed, laughed, or otherwise experienced life intensely, for better or worse, you left a record. Those who lived a quiet, well-behaved, well-tempered life? Gone without a trace.” - Magnus Flyte

42. “What you do with your resources in this life is your autobiography.” - Randy Alcorn

43. “It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.” - Isaac Marion

44. “Come out into the world about you, be it either wide or limited. Sympathize, not in thought only, but in action, with all about you. Make yourself known and felt for something that would be loved and missed, in twenty thousand little ways, if you were to die; then your life will be a happy one, believe me.” - Charles Dickens

45. “We're all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.” - George R.R. Martin

46. “You don't have to make it big, but you do have to make a big impact.” - Jamie McCall

47. “Let us live not only to serve God ourselves; let us live to help our children and their children live for God.” - Dillon Burroughs

48. “The actions you take today not only impact you; they influence generations. Every matter matters for eternity.” - Dillon Burroughs

49. “Everyone leaves a legacy, whether they want to or not. The question is, “What kind of legacy will you leave?” - Dillon Burroughs

50. “A true love can cross through your legacy and heritage.” - M.F. Moonzajer