Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

There will come a time when nobody reads my books and no one remembers who I was. And in the meantime, I'll do it my way.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Fifty years from now I'll be just three inches of type in a record book.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

People will forget me pretty quick.

In Hollywood, you can live alongside very famous but still incredibly boring people. I've never wanted to be immortal. Even if nobody remembers me after my death, it's still okay with me.

It doesn't matter how popular an actor you are: nobody will remember you forever.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest. What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.