"The immortal could we cease to contemplate, The mortal part suggests its every trait. God laid His fingers on the ivories Of her pure members as on smoothèd keys, And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies."

"I wrote my name upon the sand, And trusted it would stand for aye; But, soon, alas! the refluent sea Had washed my feeble lines away."

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

"Don't strew me with roses after I'm dead. When Death claims the light of my brow, No flowers of life will cheer me: instead You may give me my roses now!"

"Faded the flower and all its budded charms, Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes, Faded the shape of beauty from my arms, Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise! Vanish'd unseasonably …"

"So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again; Ancient and holy things fade like a dream."

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away". How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride!—how consoling in the depth of affliction!"

"Above all, Hubert was a man with a good heart. And on this sad day it would be good for us to recall Shakespeare's words:"

"Philip, remember that thou art mortal."

"He still had that marvelous swing, and what a follow-through, just beautiful, like a great golfer. But he was forty years old. He couldn’t run, he could hardly bend down for a ball, and of course he couldn’t hit the way he used to. One of the saddest things of all is when an athlete begins to lose it … and to see it happening to Babe Ruth, to see Babe Ruth struggling on a ball field, well, then you realize we’re all mortal and nothing lasts forever."

"The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power."

"Baltimore uprooted General Lee under the cover of night. New Orleans removed its four Confederate statues to mixed reactions—some voicing relief, others, disapproval. And with the violence that followed the events in Charlottesville, when white nationalists killed one counter-protestor and injured 19 more, the question of how America deals with its history of racism has continued to grow in urgency."

"There’s no easy answer when the monument in question is carved into a mountain, when Confederate generals continue to provoke strong emotions. What the debate boils down to is whose version of history will endure. And even when you have a 1,000-foot-granite wall at your disposal, it will never be enough space to capture the complexity of the nation’s centuries-long struggle with the legacy of slavery."

"He made him a hut, wherein he did put The carcass of Robinson Crusoe. O poor Robinson Crusoe!"

"Tombs are the clothes of the dead. A grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered."

"The righteous require no monuments; their lives and their teachings are their monuments."

"My engagements will not permit me to be present, and I believe if there I could not add anything material to the information existing on the subject. I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."

"Exegi monumentum ære perennius Regalique situ pyramidum altius, Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens Possit diruere aut innumerabilis Annorum series et fuga temporum. Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei Vitabit Libitinam."

"Incisa notis marmora publicis, Per quæ spiritus et vita redit bonis Post mortem ducibus."

"Cœlo tegitur qui non hatet urnam."

"Thou, in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a life-long monument."

"For men use, if they have an evil tourne, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good tourne we will write it in duste."

"Towers of silence."

"Factum abiit; monumenta manent."

"Let it rise! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming; let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and the parting day linger and play on its summit."

"If we work upon marble it will perish. If we work upon brass time will efface it. If we rear temples they will crumble to dust. But if we work upon men's immortal minds, if we imbue them with high principles, with the just fear of God and love of their fellow men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity."

"To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings."

"Again, bhikkhus, as though he were to see a corpse thrown aside in a charnel ground, one, two, or three days dead, bloated, livid, and oozing matter, a bhikkhu compares this same body with it thus: 'This body too is of the same nature, it will be like that, it is not exempt from that fate.'"

"To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul."

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."

"It's our mortality that defines us, Soran. It's part of the truth of our existence."

"You mortals are so obtuse! Why do you persist in believing that life and death are such static and rigid concepts? Why I can take your life and give it back to you again with the snap of a finger!"

"You must drink quickly as from a rapid stream that will not always flow."

"Gold once out of the earth is no more due unto it; what was unreasonably committed to the ground, is reasonably resumed from it; let monuments and rich fabricks, not riches, adorn men's ashes."

"The tap'ring pyramid, the Egyptian's pride, And wonder of the world, whose spiky top Has wounded the thick cloud."

"Jove, thou regent of the skies."

"Where London's column, pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies."

"Soldats, du haut ces Pyramide quarante siècles vous contemplent."

"You shall not pile, with servile toil, Your monuments upon my breast, Nor yet within the common soil Lay down the wreck of power to rest, Where man can boast that he has trod On him that was "the scourge of God.""

"But monuments themselves memorials need."

"To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, wore a contradiction to our belief."

"What we have inherited from our fathers and mothers is not all that 'walks in us.' There are all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no tangibility, but they haunt us all the same and we can not get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. Ghosts must be all over the country, as thick as the sands of the sea."

"And all to leave what with his toil he won, To that unfeather'd two-legged thing, a son."

"Hellenes ... think that as men and animals beget men and animals, so from good men a good man springs. But this is what nature, though she may intend it, cannot always accomplish."

"A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just."

"De male quæsitis vix gaudet tertius pæres, Nec habet eventus sordida præda bonos."

"American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. This is a lot of money, but it is distributed very unevenly.. ... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness."