Joseph Addison Quotes

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.

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.

Anybody who is stupid enough to want to be remembered deserves to be forgotten right now.

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

As people get older and fall out of the spotlight, people's memory of them changes.

Nobody will go on being remembered for a very long time, unless you're Shakespeare or Milton. I have no hope of being remembered at all.

Honestly, when I left the business, in time, some people might remember you and some might say they knew the name. But, people move on and there are new interests and all kinds of different things go on all the time. So, it surprised me how people have not forgotten.

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.

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.

Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science.

I can't picture people talking about me 50 years from now.

One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.

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

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced.

Nothing really dies as long as it's not forgotten

Every noble deed dieth, if suppressed in silence.

To occupy an inch of dusty shelf-to have the title of their works read now and then in a future age by some drowsy churchman or casual straggler, and in another age to be lost, even to remembrance. Such is the amount of boasted immortality.

Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.

If I make a mark in time, I can't say the mark is mine.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.

Jesus was not famous in his day. If there were no Bible, there would have been no record of him. The record belongs to his four disciples; nobody else has ever mentioned him, whether he existed or not. He was not famous. He was not successful. Can you think of a greater failure than Jesus? But, by and by, he became more and more significant; by and by, people recognized him. It takes time.