Legacy of Knowledge Quotes

Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go.

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

Over the years, I learned so much from mom. She taught me about the importance of home and history and family and tradition. She also taught me that aging need not mean narrowing the scope of your activities and interests or a diminution of the great pleasures to be had in the everyday.

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

We no longer love our knowledge enough once we have passed it on.

All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

The wish to pass something on to your children is about the most basic, human and natural aspiration there is.

I think it's like a relay race. You run, and you hand over the baton, and your kids pick it up. They take the stuff they want, throw the rest away, and keep running. That's what life is about.

My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.

I have had enough experience in all my years, and have read enough of the past, to know that advice to grandchildren is usually wasted.

Advice is not a gift, but a debt that the old owe to the young.

God has given us these talents and we want to pass on our best.

God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.