James Mackintosh Quotes

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

… the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

I never wanted to go to the Old Vic and not have it survive long after I was gone. It's not about me; it's about that theater. And the more that it's able to grow and do everything it should do without me, then I've done my job.

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!

Everyone wants to be immortal. Few are. Margaret Thatcher is. Why? Because her values are timeless, eternal. Tap anyone on the shoulder anywhere in the world, and ask what Mrs Thatcher believed in, and they will tell you. They can give a clear answer to what she 'stood for.'

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

Man has always needed to believe in some form of a continuity of achievement.

Men die but an idea does not.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

A book is the only immortality.

What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.

Death can never kill an idea. Ideas are more powerful than death. Ideas outlive men and can never be destroyed.

To achieve greatness one should live as if they will never die.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

If you forget your history, you forget who you are.

When you're caught up in your career, you're not thinking about becoming a legend one day or how, 25 years from now, you'll be immortalized in something or that you might be going into the Hall of Fame.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

There's one form of immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.

Books -lighthouses erected in the great sea of time -books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius -books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes, -these were to visit the firesides of the humble and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor.

I think it's every artist's dream to create something that will endure, something that people will listen to until there are no more people on earth to listen to things.

Work for immortality if you will: then wait for it.

Law dies, books never.

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)