Patrimony Quotes

• A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers, they arouse and animate our own people.

  Henry Clay

  Character, People, Deeds

  Henry Clay (2015). “The Papers of Henry Clay: The Rising Statesman 1815--1820”, p.149, University Press of Kentucky

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• To live without faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for truth, that is not living but existing

  Pier Giorgio Frassati

  Struggle, Steady

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• The reason for much matrimony is patrimony.

  Ogden Nash

  Marriage, Reason, Matrimony

  Ogden Nash (1931). “Hard lines”

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• The present generation finds itself the heir of a vast patrimony of science; and it must needs concern us to know the steps by which these possessions were acquired, and the documents by which they are secured to us and our heirs for ever.

  William Whewell

  Needs, Generations, Heirs

  William Whewell (1857). “History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time”, p.3

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• Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

  Samuel Johnson

  Happiness, Success, Men

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1840). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.249

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• Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty.

  Francis of Assisi

  Sublime, Treasure, Poverty

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• Grant me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.

  Francis of Assisi

  Begging You, Order, Names

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• History is the heritage and patrimony of mankind in its lessons of the past that give priceless inspiration for the future.

  Henry Clausen

  Inspiration, Past, Giving

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• No one has the right to change Paris, the protesters say, and argue that the city is the patrimony of all mankind.

  John Vinocur

  Change, Cities, Paris

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• Men sooner forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Death, Father, Loss

  Niccolo Machiavelli (2010). “The Prince”, p.69, FastPencil Inc

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• Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony

  Samuel Johnson

  Men, Rich Or Poor, Long

  Samuel Johnson (1824). “Works: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.135

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• Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Happiness, Men, Literature

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 461, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius (1795-1822), Chapter XXII, 1922.

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• You are worried about what man has done and is doing to this magical planet that God gave us. And I share your concern. What is a conservative after all but one who conserves, one who is committed to protecting and holding close the things by which we live...And we want to protect and conserve the land on which we live - our countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests. This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.

  Ronald Reagan

  Children, Responsibility, Men

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• But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head; both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in me all Paradise Lost Posterity stands cursed: fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!

  John Milton

  Son, Paradise, Able

  John Milton (2009). “The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton”, p.576, Modern Library

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• We lose the forest for the trees, forgetting, even so far as we think at all, that we are trustees for those who come after us, squandering the patrimony which we have received.

  Learned Hand

  Thinking, Tree, Forests

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• And when he is obliged to take the life of any one, to do so when there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it; but above all he must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Art, Father, War

  Niccolo Machiavelli (2017). “The Prince”, p.53, Race Point Publishing

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• I'm sorry, Dite." Dite shrugged away the apology. "You have spared my brother when you could have killed him and you have offered me escape from the cesspit of my family and this court. You know what it means to me, to make music in the court of Ferria. You've put a purse and an impossible dream in my hand. I don't know why you should apologize." "Because I am exiling you, Dite. I intend to raze your patrimony and salt its earth. You emphatically do not need to thank me.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Dream, Brother, Sorry

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• An absolute monarch, who is rich without patrimony, may be charitable without merit; and Constantine too easily believed that he should purchase the favour of Heaven if he maintained the idle at the expense of the industrious, and distributed among the saints the wealth of the republic.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Heaven, Saint

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.388, Wordsworth Editions

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• The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into theheritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.

  Hannah Arendt

  Government, Europe, Political

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• Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

  Mordecai Richler

  Father, Dying, Ashes

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• Let us regard the forests as an inheritance, given to us by nature, not to be despoiled or devastated, but to be wisely used, reverently honoured and carefully maintained. Let us regard the forests as a gift, entrusted to any of us only for transient care, to be surrendered to posterity as an unimpaired property, increased in riches and augmented in blessings, to pass as a sacred patrimony from generation to generation.

  Ferdinand von Mueller

  Blessing, Generations, Inheritance

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