“And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.”
Source: Selected Poetry
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William Wordsworth306
English Romantic poet 1770–1850Related quotes
“We love a genius for what he leaves and mourn him for what he takes away.”
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter
Quote in Gainsborough's Letter to Henry Bate, 20th June 1787
1770 - 1788
Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet
Act I, sc. 7.
Philip van Artevelde (1834)
Variant: Such souls,
Whose sudden visitations daze the world,
Vanish like lighting, but they leave behind
A voice that in the distance far away
Wakens the slumbering ages.
Pericles (-494–-429 BC) Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens
As quoted in Flicker to Flame : Living with Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness (2006) by Jeffrey Thompson Parker, p. 118
This quotation is likely a modern paraphrasing of a longer passage from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, II.43.3.
“What you leave behind is the people you loved. You leave yourself in them.”
Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting
Source: Sisterhood Everlasting
“No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me.”
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing
Letter to Madame Mohl (13 December 1861)
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)
Context: Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy — as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen [farm laborers]. No Roman Catholic Supérieure [president of a French university system known for their diverse, eclectic teaching methods] has ever had charge of women of the different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women. … No woman that I know has ever appris à apprendre [learned to learn]. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. You say somewhere that women have no attention. Yes. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. … It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about "the want of a field" for them — when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year [roughly $50,000 a year in 2008] for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get one.