Alan Jay Lerner Quotes

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

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

If a man can bridge the gap between life and death, if he can live on after he's dead, then maybe he was a great man.

… 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.

The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.

In many ways ideas are more important than people - they are much more permanent.

Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

I’ll tell you this, I may be dead but my ideas will not die.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

I think an artist's true worth comes through an inter-generational thing - when you go beyond your own time, and start influencing people in a greater way than just what surrounds you.

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

If what you create does not outlive you, then you have failed.

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.'

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. It is to create something that will.

Every moment is, in some ways, eternal. Once you put something into the world, it stays there.

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.

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

If what that man did in his life, makes the blood pulse through the body of others, and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit, will be immortalized by the storytellers, by the loyalty, by the memory, of those who honor him and make whatever the man did live forever.

Men are mortal, but ideas are immortal.

I shall not completely die.

They never die, who have the future in them.