“There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”
The Book of Ecclesiastes, 1611 · Ecclesiastes 1:11, King James Version
Chapter 1
On What Remains
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818 · English poet, from the sonnet Ozymandias
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, and all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, awaits alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Thomas Gray, 1751 · English poet, from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.”
Marcus Aurelius, c. 170 AD · Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher
“I have completed a monument more lasting than brass, which neither the wasting shower nor an innumerable succession of years shall be able to demolish. I shall not wholly die.”
Horace, c. 23 BC · Roman poet, closing his third book of Odes
“And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born.”
The Wisdom of Sirach, 1611 · Sirach 44:9, King James Version Apocrypha
“The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rot.”
The Book of Proverbs, 1611 · Proverbs 10:7, King James Version
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb, and in lands far from their own there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten, with no tablet to preserve it except that of the heart.”
Pericles, c. 431 BC · Athenian statesman, in his funeral oration for the war dead
“He who dies and yet does not perish has longevity.”
Laozi, c. 400 BC · Chinese sage, founder of the Taoist tradition
Asked what makes a good death, patients, families and clinicians named the same six things. One of them was simply this: the chance to go on contributing to other people.
Karen Steinhauser and colleagues, 2000 · study of patients, families, physicians and other care providers
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.”
George Eliot, 1872 · English novelist, closing lines of Middlemarch
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