Francis J. Grimke Quotes

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

I condemn the dust of which I am made, this dust that speaks to you now. It can be persecuted, it can be brought to death. But I challenge the world to take from me that part of me which will live through the centuries and survive in the skies

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

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.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

It's not lost on me that everyone dies, but some people have a kind of immortality about them, and you can't imagine that they will ever be gone.

Everyone dies, and I am not, you know, I don't believe in the Homeric idea that, you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?

I’ll never die", he said. Before I could protest, Lucas put two fingers on my lips, his smile seemed to fill the room with lights and I realized he was telling a deeper kind of truth then I’d ever known before “You’ll live forever and being remembered by you is the only immortality I’ll ever need if I only live on as a part of you – Bianca, that’s my idea of heaven

Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.

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.

When my soul leaves this human dwelling, I will not consider myself to have completely died, but to pass from one state to another, given that, in you and by you, I remain in my visible image in this world.

We exist as long as somebody remembers us.

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.

But he has gone, A nation's memory and veneration, Among the radiant, ever venturing on, Somewhere, with morning, as such spirits will.

There are some dead who are more alive than the living.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

On great fields something stays.

Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

If there is any one truth from the legacy of the Cayce readings, it would be that there is a spiritual dimension to humans, something beyond time and space.

Now more than ever, I have learned that, when people die, they truly do live throughout those who love them.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.