Nicolas Berggruen Quotes

Words have a longevity that I do not have.

Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one's achieve­ments. These alone count in life.

The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.

Things are forgotten and then perhaps picked up again, if we're lucky, it lasts... if not, then it's in the lap of the gods. The important thing was to do some work that I liked and hopefully that some others might also like, whether for a minute, a week, a month, a year.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Nothing ever goes away.

What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

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.

The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.

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

Our works decay and disappear but God gentlest works stay looking down on the ruins we toil to rear.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

There is real value in sharing moments that don't live forever.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, song passes not away.

Lies here food for the worms yet the work shall not be lost.

I don't want to be something that just comes and goes.

Talent survives and remains while beauty is diluted.

Some people care about their work lasting forever - I have little interest in it.