John Lothrop Motley Quotes

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

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

I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.

One-hundred years from now, nobody's going to remember that I played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays - nobody!

Monuments, like men, submit to fate.

If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

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.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Deeds survive the doers.

Who gives a damn about being remembered? That's really for amateurs.

I want to be remembered as part of the group of the greatest players ever.

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.

A great reputation is a great noise, the more there is of it, and the further does it swell. Land, monuments, Nations, all fall, but the noise remains, and will reach to other generations.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

How prudently most men creep into nameless graves, while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another.

The Z’s will kill us all, and then the Z’s will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline’s wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes’s musings, or Michelangelo’s sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

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.

Our public monuments are memorials to the Enlightenment.

When we die, no one remembers us for what we weighed. Our weight isn't etched into our headstones.

The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains.

I love museums, and I think they're fantastic, but they don't touch the people who I frequently think need to be touched with at least some reminder of legacy.