Archives: Quotes

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel –movement through space –provided the universal metaphor for change. one of the subtle confusions –perhaps one of the secret terrors –of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.

Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it; and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.