Enduring Influence Quotes

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year.

Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Shakespeare's work is like a good song: you never really forget the main lines.

When I die, they'll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.

A Politician is never remembered for how he started. He is remembered for how he finished.

Like every artist that comes out, you want to make a mark; you want to be a household name and you want to be someone that people are going to look back in ten years/fifteen years' time and go, 'I love this guy Olly Murs. He was brilliant back in the day; he was someone I really, really liked.'

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.

I'm lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there's ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words - the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.

A person's shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries.

Now, forty years after his passing, Winston Churchill is still quoted, read, revered, and referred to as much, if not more, than when he was alive.

I used to imagine that making it in music - really making it in music - is if you're an old man going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That's the ultimate. You're in the culture.

Not everybody has that mentality and that's fine, but once Robert Redford leaves this earth - later rather than sooner - his legacy will go on.

At some point of time, Imman won't be in this world. But my biggest asset would be if my biggest hater had at least 100 songs that I composed in his playlist. That's how I know my work will continue to live.

If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

You'll live forever, and being remembered by is the only immortality I'll ever need. If i only live on as a part of you--Bianca, that's my idea of Heaven

Most of us will be remembered, in work and in life, for just a few words or deeds that made a difference to others. The way we choose to say good-bye is likely to be one of the ways we are remembered.

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

A great character, founded on the living rock of principle is, in fact, not a solitary phenomenon, to be at once perceived, limited, and described. It is a dispensation of Providence, designed to have not merely an immediate, but a continuous, progressive, and never-ending agency. It survives the man who possessed it; survives his age,--and perhaps, his country, his language.