W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.

Things you create with your mind are always part of your postmortal life, whether they seem real or not.

I could care less about ever having a No. 1 single. I would just like to be able to play and have people who grow old with you, and you stay with them through their life. We've got a few sentences, maybe, to say what life's about. Hopefully, we'll get a chapter later.

I care about doing the work as best as I can do, and that it should go on reaching people. It's not about fame and it's not about me. It's about creating something that might allow someone else to create something.

Whether you reach a lot of people or have a profound impact on a few people, their memories of you are your afterlife.

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!

The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me.

The things that I leave creatively are going to stay here long past me. That's the reason why the album is called '4Eva Is a Mighty Long Time.'

People rewrite the play so much to make it palatable to the audience, to make something clear, that they just deaden it. Like it was left it in the oven too long.

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.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

I enjoy the making of the film and it's something for me to do. If nobody ever comes to my films, if people don't want to give me money to make films, that will stop me. But as long as people come all over the world and I have an audience and I have ideas for films, I will do them for as long as I enjoy the process. And I like the whole process of making a film.

My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

I've made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I'm there.

As long as my ballets are danced, I will live.

Perhaps the ultimate test of a leader is not what you are able to do in the here and now - but instead what continues to grow long after you're gone

I'm just happy that I'm able to take care of what I need to take care of, live, and do the thing that I love the most and that is to sing. People want to hear it, buy it, see it, hold it, record it, bootleg it. It's fine with me as long as it's good but when it's bad I'm in trouble!

My songs will pass and be forgotten. What counts, however, is that I sang them.

I would love to win an Oscar one day. That would be a very wonderful thing. But in the meantime, I really hope that I make films I'm proud of. A lot of people aren't going to like the movies I make, I'm sure. But as long as I'm proud of the movie and I'm not selling out, and I'm doing things that make me happy and make me grow as an actress, I'll be good.

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.

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

It might be a kind of relief to be finished. You have to start all over again. But I believe you’re always as good as your potential. I now live in my work and in a few relationships with the few people I can really count on. Fame will go by, and, so long, I’ve had you fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

I'm a songwriter. So I'm OK. But when I wrote "Stand By Me" as a song and to know that the song will probably be here for hundred and hundreds of years to come, it's great, you know. And it was just simple lyrics.

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It's the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: 'He passed it on.'