Pete Sampras Quotes

I think legacies are most meaningful with the impressions that a person can leave on a group of people.

Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.

I don't think I deviated from what I'm all about and what I thought was important. Whether you want to call that a legacy, or whatever you want to call it.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

You can't impose a legacy.

I'm attending to my legacy, making sure that it travels the universe in the best shape I can get it into. For as long as I'm alive, I'll still be its interpreter.

That, for me, is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do.

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.

I'm in there for more than just a fight. I'm in there fighting for my legacy.

There is only one entity which I built, which is HCL. And the legacy which I want to leave behind that is in my name. There is only one thing which bears my name in the doorsteps - that is only the University and the foundation. And that legacy will not have a price tag.

You can't rewrite the history books; you can't eliminate the impact of my work and my characters.

Sooner or later the public will forget you; the memory of you will fade. What's important are the individuals you've influenced along the way.

The game is always going to be bigger than the man and it doesn't matter what you are doing; records or whatever, somebody is just going to come along and break your records. But to achieve something that people would always look up to is something you will always appreciate.

That which we say and do, if its effects last not beyond our lives, is unimportant.

If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

The game will fade one day. I realize that success is one thing; impact is another. I live to impact people.

I think people in the future will come up to me and say, "Everything that you are and everything that you have is because of that butler [film]." Of course, that's Oprah's line from the movie, but I think it will resonate with my legacy with the movie.

Once I finally stepped on the moon, no matter what was to come of the next three days - or the rest of my life - nobody could take those steps from me. People ask how long will they be there, and I say forever, however long forever is, like my daughter’s initials that I scribbled in the sand [TDC for Tracy Dawn Cernan].

There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak?

The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.

When I die, they'll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.

For the greater a man's works for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight, and the rarer success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.

Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.

The sobering thought is that individuals and societies are not, in the end, remembered for how they made their money, but for how they spent it.

A great character, founded on the living rock of principle is, in fact, not a solitary phenomenon, to be at once perceived, limited, and described. It is a dispensation of Providence, designed to have not merely an immediate, but a continuous, progressive, and never-ending agency. It survives the man who possessed it; survives his age,--and perhaps, his country, his language.