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Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
-Anon.
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This is the beginning of a new day.
You have been given this day to use as you will.
You can waste it or use it for good.
What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.
When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever;in its place is something that you have left behind...
let it be something good.
-Anon.
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My name is `Abdu'l-Bahá [literally, Servant of Baha]. My qualification is `Abdu'l-Bahá. My reality is `Abdu'l-Bahá. My praise is `Abdu'l-Bahá. Thraldom to the Blessed Perfection [Bahá'u'lláh] is my glorious and refulgent diadem, and servitude to all the human race my perpetual religion... No name, no title, no mention, no commendation have I, nor will ever have, except `Abdu'l-Bahá. This is my longing. This is my greatest yearning. This is my eternal life. This is my everlasting glory.
-Abdu'l-Baha
[letter to followers in America]
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If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory.
-Agesilaus II
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I
-Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
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The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind.
-John Allston
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Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
-John Arbuthnot
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
-W. H. Auden
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Biography should be written by an acute enemy.
-Arthur Balfour
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Every man
-P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum
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Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.
-Augusto Roa Bastos
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Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.
-Hilaire Belloc
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Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form -- it may be called fleeting or eternal -- is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
-Walter Benjamin
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
-John Berger
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In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
-Catherine Drinker Bowen
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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
-Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451, October, 1953
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A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
-Fawn M. Brodie
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
-Italo Calvino
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When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.
-Elias Canetti
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Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.
-Neville Cardus
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A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
-Thomas Carlyle
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History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-Thomas Carlyle
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If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.
-Thomas Carlyle
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No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.
-Thomas Carlyle
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There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.
-Raymond Chandler
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Books about Legacy
