Adam Smith Quotes

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors - mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.

If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.

Well, there's a remedy for all things but death, which will be sure to lay us flat one time or other.

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

Makers of empire, they have fought for bigger things than crowns and higher seats than thrones.

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

The pursuit of eternity is no longer the prerogative of the gods - it is the business of us all, here and now.

Art is eternal, but life is short.

The game was here long before I was, and will be here long after I'm gone.

All men die. You may say: 'Is that encouraging?' Surely yes, for when a man dies, his blunders, which are of the form, all die with him, but the things in him that are part of the life never die, although the form be broken.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

The best instituted governments carry in them the seeds of their own destruction; and though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour that they live is an hour less that they have to live.

There must … be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.

in their ideal forms nation and empire stand at opposite ends of a political spectrum, but in the actuality of history they influenced, reinforced, and undermined one another at different times and in different ways.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

It is wise to seek immortality for time defeats all other ambitions.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Unvisited tombstones, unread diaries, and erased video game high-score rankings are three of the most potent symbols of mankind's pathetic and fruitless attempts at immortality.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

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

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.

Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.