James A. Garfield Quotes

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

But monument themselves memorials need.

When you build a memorial, you build it not because the person wanted it, but for the future -- for generations who didn't know the man and didn't know the era in which he lived.

A remembrance can mean nothing to the one remembered; it can only remind the ones left behind how little they did while you were still alive.

The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

I've seen the video played over and over, and it replays in my head constantly. To be able to walk in his exact footsteps is an extremely huge honor, and I did this for him as much as I did it for my family to get some closure too.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

I'm lucky. Usually you're dead to get your own museum, but I'm still alive to see mine.

The whole memorial is for different senses... seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. I probably would have come up with something different if I had not lived through it.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

All great people glorify their history and look back upon their early attainments with a spiritualized vision.

Gold is special, and what makes it special is thousands of years of people wanting it..

My artistic decision to cast my mother's objects into bronze moves beyond the notions of memorializing her. I've been fascinated for some time with the idea of monumentality and what it means to memorialize. Both of these notions are relevant historically, artistically, and culturally.

Marble statues, engraved with public inscriptions, by which the life and soul return after death to noble leaders.

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

Remembrance is a form of meeting.

We hold reunions, not for the dead, for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them.

The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about