Quotes about legend (267 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Heroes come and go, but legends are forever.”

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player

“The history of the castle at Wiśnicz Nowy is enlivened by many legends. Many well-known artists visited the castle in centuries past. Till now, many elements of old architecture (towers, chapel) have survived, together with some details of interior design.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

The castle of Kmita and Lubomirski at Wiśnicz Nowy, "Aura" 2, 1991-02, p. 18-20. http://agro.icm.edu.pl/agro/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-bd5a073d-07bd-4353-9edc-6bf8ea3d43c5?q=de70f1df-826d-4538-9cee-535aa9902521$5&qt=IN_PAGE

History , Past

“The importance of oaks both in the economy and in the forest ecosystem is big, but the exceptional part is that this tree plays in the old beliefs and legends.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

Oak - the king of the Polish trees, "Aura" 9, 1988-09, p. 20-21. http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-72dccf88-5430-4d92-8617-9f550865d9b9?q=1dac2329-67be-4b51-b5b3-4554b1ebe953$15&qt=IN_PAGE

Tree , Parting

“I came like a king, left like a legend.”

Zlatan Ibrahimović (1981) Swedish association football player

Before playing his last game in Parc des Princes, Paris. https://twitter.com/Ibra_official/status/731025180777172992
Attributed

“Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

Diamonds & Rust
Diamonds & Rust (1975)

Girl , Sea

“Almost from the time of Xavier's actual presence on the Coast, the work of legend-building began, and it came to be firmly believed that he possessed miraculous powers, which extended even to the raising of the dead. Xavier never made such extravagant claims for himself.”

Francis Xavier (1506–1552) Navarrese Basque Roman Catholic saint and missionary

Neill, S. (2004). A history of Christianity in India: The beginning to AD 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Time , Dead

“I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L. R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

No. 247: To Colonel Worskett (20 September 1963)
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

World , Beauty , History , Thinking

“This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

"I am the Greatest" (1964) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZU_AvPPIQY
Context: This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y,
Of a muscular punch that's incredibly speed-y.
The fistic world was dull and weary,
But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color and someone with dash,
Brought fight fans a-runnin' with cash.
This brash young boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his destiny.

World , Beauty

“After a great war, history is written by the victors and legends develop which glorify them.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

from p. 35 of "The Third Reich and The Atomic Bomb [Review of The Virus House by David Irving]" in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Pp. 34-35, June 1968), translated from the German by Margaret Seckel.

History , War

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Life

“Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful”

Michael Moorcock book Elric of Melniboné

Source: Elric of Melniboné

Success

“Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Religion

“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Love , Life

“There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.”

Diane Arbus (1923–1971) American photographer and author

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Looking Back: Diane Arbus at the Met" http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/03/21/050321craw_artworld?currentPage=all, The New Yorker, March 21, 2005. Retrieved February 4, 2010. source: Sass, Louis A. "'Hyped on Clarity': Diane Arbus and the Postmodern Condition". Raritan, volume 25, number 1, pp. 1–37, Summer 2005.

Source: Kimmelman, Michael, The Profound Vision of Diane Arbus: Flaws in Beauty, Beauty in Flaws, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/11/arts/design/the-profound-vision-of-diane-arbus-flaws-in-beauty-beauty-in.html, 1 November 2018, The New York Times, 11 March 2005

Personality , Life , People

“Jay's favorite line: "Dog, in due time"
Now he look at me, like "Damn, dog, you where I am"
A hip hop legend.
I think I died in an accident, cause this must be heaven.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Touch the Sky
Lyrics, Late Registration (2005)

Dogs , Thinking , Time

“I would like to show the German people a film with the title "Germany at the end of the war". Then perhaps people would be alarmed and would realize where we are heading. People would agree with me that the superior warlord (Hitler) must disappear. But since we cannot show this movie people will create the legend of the "stab in the back" whenever we will act against Hitler.”

Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944) German general

December 1941. Bodo Scheurig, Henning von Tresckow, <i>ein Preusse gegen Hitler</i>, p. 135-6.

War , People

“"In God We Trust." Now then, after that legend had remained there forty years or so, unchallenged and doing no harm to anybody, the President suddenly "threw a fit" the other day, as the popular expression goes, and ordered that remark to be removed from our coinage.
Mr. Carnegie granted that the matter was not of consequence, that a coin had just exactly the same value without the legend as with it, and he said he had no fault to find with Mr. Roosevelt's action but only with his expressed reasons for the act. The President had ordered the suppression of that motto because a coin carried the name of God into improper places, and this was a profanation of the Holy Name. Carnegie said the name of God is used to being carried into improper places everywhere and all the time, and that he thought the President's reasoning rather weak and poor.
I thought the same, and said, "But that is just like the President. If you will notice, he is very much in the habit of furnishing a poor reason for his acts while there is an excellent reason staring him in the face, which he overlooks. There was a good reason for removing that motto; there was, indeed, an unassailably good reason — in the fact that the motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party and the dollar–mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine; sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease.
Take an instance: the removal of the motto fetched out a clamor from the pulpit; little groups and small conventions of clergymen gathered themselves together all over the country, and one of these little groups, consisting of twenty-two ministers, put up a prodigious assertion unbacked by any quoted statistics and passed it unanimously in the form of a resolution: the assertion, to wit, that this is a Christian country. Why, Carnegie, so is hell. Those clergymen know that, inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few — few — are they that enter in thereat" has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Statements (c. December 1907), in Mark Twain In Eruption : Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men And Events (1940) edited by Bernard Augustine De Voto

God , Lie , World , Disease

“You don't need to show them to me [the notes of the complete interview which Christian Zervos], editor of 'Cahiers d'Art' showed Picasso after their conversations at Boisgeloup: Picasso's country place then]. The essential thing in our period of weak morale is to create enthusiasm. How many people have actually read Homer? All the same the whole world talks of him. In this way the Homeric legend is created. A legend in this sense provokes a valuable stimulus. Enthusiasm is what we need most, we and the younger generation.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Boisgeloup, 1935
As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008
Quotes, 1930's, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35

People , World , Way , Sense

“Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Mythopoeia (1931)

Time

“By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 6

Science

“It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. … Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends…”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

No. 180: To a Mr. Thompson (incomplete draft of a letter, 1956).
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

War , Dependency , Dead

“If you will, it is no legend…”

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer

Prefix to Altneuland, (1902)
Originally in German: Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen... which was intended to have the double meaning of a strong will shall eventually be realized, and as part of a paragraph ending as a postfix to the book, that this book perhaps will be seen as a true story, but even if not...
The Israeli rightist movement "Im Tirzu" (Literally: 'If you will') is named after this quote.

“Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the condition of the rabble matter? All we need do is to keep it as quiet as we can. What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. "Equality" is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. If it is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled town, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields — these are all there is of life: take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. The blood of a million men is well shed in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it is not at all important why it was shed.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (10 February 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Life , Men , Books , Beauty

“In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)

God , Travel , Night

“Take new values : Leave behind a legend to be followed by those who follow you.”

Harbhajan Singh Yogi (1929–2004) Indian-American Sikh Yogi

Remark (9 January 1978), as quoted in Transitions to a Heart Centered World : Through the Kundalini Yoga and Meditations of Yogi Bhajan (1988) by Guru Rattana and Ann M. Maxwellm, p. 107
Context: Take new values : Leave behind a legend to be followed by those who follow you. Be a yogi — don't be an ordinary person.

“On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.”

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

Book I, 21-[1]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I

Truth , Quotes , Time

“The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the "happy ending."”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
On Fairy-Stories (1939)

Happiness

“There is a legend about a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth.”

Colleen McCullough book The Thorn Birds

Epigraph, The Thorn Birds (1977)
Context: There is a legend about a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. Dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of the great pain. … Or so says the legend.

Life , Bird , Singing

“Here the old Bacchic piety endures,
Here the sweet legends of the world remain.”

Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English writer and gardener

"Tuscany" in The Best Poems of 1923 (1924) edited by Thomas Moult
Context: The dusk is heavy with the wine's warm load;
Here the long sense of classic measure cures
The spirit weary of its difficult pain;
Here the old Bacchic piety endures,
Here the sweet legends of the world remain.

World

“Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)
Context: The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. … But this story has entered History and the primary world; … It has pre-eminently the "inner consistency of reality." There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation.... this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

Men , God , Art , Angels

“If there is truth in the popular legend, that Antichrist will be born from a monk and a nun (which is the story these people keep putting about), how many thousands of Antichrists the world must have already!”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

Responding to rumours prompted by the marriage of Martin Luther, in a letter to François Dubois (13 March 1526), as translated in The Correspondence of Erasmus : Letters 1658 to 1801, January 1526-March 1527 (1974) edited by Charles Garfield Nauert and Alexander Dalzell, p. 79
Paraphrased variant: They say that the Antichrist will be born of a monk and a nun. If so, there must already be thousands of Antichrists.
Context: There is no doubt about Martin Luther's marriage, but the rumour about his wife's early confinement is false; she is said however to be pregnant now. If there is truth in the popular legend, that Antichrist will be born from a monk and a nun (which is the story these people keep putting about), how many thousands of Antichrists the world must have already!

People , Truth , World

“You must have heard about the beautiful Sufi legend of Majnu and Laila.”

Rajneesh (1931–1990) Godman and leader of the Rajneesh movement

Sufis, The People of the Path, Vol. 1
Context: You must have heard about the beautiful Sufi legend of Majnu and Laila. It is not an ordinary love story. The word majnu means mad, mad for God. And laila is the symbol of God. Sufis think of God as the beloved; laila means the beloved. Everybody is a Majnu, and God is the beloved. And one has to open one’s heart, the eye of the heart.

Beauty

“There are legends of the metamorphosis of men: with you the gods also are metamorphosed. Rhea becomes a tree; Zeus a dragon, on account of Persephone; the sisters of Phaethon are changed into poplars, and Leto into a bird of little value, on whose account what is now Delos was called Ortygia. A god, forsooth, becomes a swan, or takes the form of an eagle, and, making Ganymede his cupbearer, glories in a vile affection. How can I reverence gods who are eager for presents, and angry if they do not receive them? Let them have their Fate!”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Ante-Nicene Christian library: v. 3 p. 15
Address to the Greeks

God , Tree , Fate , Making love

“In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water.”

Fredric Brown book Letter to a Phoenix

Letter to a Phoenix (p. 337)
Short fiction, From These Ashes (2000)

Water , Memory , Change

“This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations — the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Ch. XXXVIII http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5811/5811-h/5811-h.htm
Following the Equator (1897)

God , Religion , History , Country

“All my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Attributed to Lovecraft by Harold Farnese, who corresponded with Lovecraft briefly, later presented by August Derleth as a direct quote; but as discussed on this page http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/myths.aspx#blackmagic, Farnese's letters to Derleth suggested he tended to paraphrase things Lovecraft had written to him, going by memory rather than referring to letters he had on hand. More details in "The Origin of Lovecraft’s 'Black Magic' Quote" by David E. Schultz, *Crypt of Cthulhu*, issue 48.
Disputed

World , Time

“The singing legend lives on her suprabathams (morning prayer songs) and w:bhajansbhajans.”

M. S. Subbulakshmi (1916–2004) singer,Carnatic vocalist

Quoted in Ode to a Nightingale in "The Complete Guide to Functional Writing in English}, pages= 11-12
About M.S.

Singing

“Michael has been the author of a unique chapter in the history of Formula 1 and of Ferrari in particular. It has yet to reach its conclusion and what he has achieved extends over and above the results obtained. He is an exceptional man and will become a legend as a driver.”

Michael Schumacher (1969) German racing driver

Jean Todt, Ferrari team boss, cited in: Planet-F1 (2006) "Todt and Montezemolo hail 'legend' Schumi". on Planet-F1. September 12, 2006 (no longer online)

History

“We walk this earth
hand with hand and head by head
along with shadows of fairy tales
myths and legends spread by superstitious folks
and oddly we yearn to all of them
with sadness and despair
like drowning sailor who longs for sip of air
with playful joy against the odds
we seek to tame good auld death
forgetting that lady D is a wild cat
that carves its paths with fangs and claws step by step
step by step
until she is to close
- inside your head”

Marcin Malek (1975) Polish writer

Source: We'll go asleep, poems and ballads, "Untill she is to close", pg 64

Despair , Forgetting , Cats , Joy

“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight? For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Context: Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight? A man may do both, said Aragorn. For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!

Time

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

(15 January 1990)

Age , Birth , Memory , Time

“Dragons and legends… It would have been difficult for any man not to want to fight beside a dragon.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Dragon Blood

Fight

“Underground, the stars are legend.”

Catherine Fisher book Incarceron

Source: Incarceron

Star

“Laistrygonians. Cannibals. Northern Giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They are not birds. Not birds of North America.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Bird

“A legend, Kludd, is a story that you begin to feel in your gizzard and then over time it becomes true in your heart. And perhaps makes you become a better owl.”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

Feeling , Time , Heart

“Maybe getting around in life was nothing but map-reading. A skill that required practice. A key to unlock where you wanted to go. A legend to show where you were.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Life , Reading

“Not even your love could withhold you from fulfilling your own personal legend.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love , Personality

“Legends were not only for the desperate. Legends were for the brave. (Soren)”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate , Pleasure , Sadness , Suffering

“Ireland is a land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels. All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing or for weeping, for battle or for love.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Tears of the Moon

Love , Music , Dance

“This isn’t really death,’ Tyler says. ‘We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old.’ I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you’re thinking of vampires.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Death , Thinking

“Remember no one expects you to be Halt. He's a legend, after all. Haven't you heard? He's eight feet tall and kills bears with his bare hands…”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Erak's Ransom

“A legend is merely a history man decided to bugger.”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Hunt the Moon

History

“This is where you and I are headed…. Look for us in history books and you'll find us in the margins. Look for us in legends and you might just find us celebrated”

Scott Lynch (1978) American writer

Books , History

“You must understand that love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it's because it wasn't a true love.. the love that speaks the language of the world.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love , World , Understanding , Personality

“Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.”

Stephen King The Dark Tower

Source: The Dark Tower

“Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.”

Aleksandar Hemon Nowhere Man

Source: Nowhere Man

Life , Memory

“You know the legend. Stab them in the heart and they’ll die. (Ravyn)
Call me Buffy. I’m even blond, but don’t ask me to wear a halter top. Or corset. (Susan)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dark Side of the Moon

Heart

“I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours”

Jack Kerouac book Tristessa

Source: Tristessa

Life , People , Sadness , Memory

“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy… or they become legend.”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

People

“But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story…”

David Clement-Davies book The Sight

Source: The Sight

Life , Reality

“Sometimes a legend that endures for centuries… endures for a reason.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

“Good men don't become legends," he said quietly.
"Good men don't need to become legends." She opened her eyes, looking up at him. "They just do what's right anyway.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

Men

“But the world turns, and even legends change; and somewhere there is a border, and sometime, perhaps, someone will decide to cross it, however well guarded its thorns may be.”

Robin McKinley (1952) American fantasy writer

Source: The Door in the Hedge

World , Change

“Can no one imagine an incompetent Legend?”

John Steakley book Armor

Armor

Imagination

“If you are a vampire, then a vampire is not the creature of the legends.”

Christine Feehan book Dark Prince

Source: Dark Prince

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”

Richard Matheson book I Am Legend

Source: I Am Legend

Death

“I went down to Captain Tony's to get out of the heat
When I heard a voice call out to me, "Son, come have a seat."
I had to search my memory as I looked into those eyes;
Our lives change like the weather but a legend never dies”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Last Mango in Paris
Song lyrics, Last Mango in Paris (1985)

Search , Memory , Change , Weather

“My first memory of Nirvana was getting a cassette of demos, which ended up becoming Bleach. Everybody's response was that this was an amazing band and these were amazing songs. It was another indication that the Northwest had something special that you couldn't argue with.
It was pretty shocking to see a threepiece that sounded like that, and trying to get inside the head of a guy who writes a song like "Floyd the Barber" – where does the kernel of a song like that start?
The Seattle scene benefitted from an MTV culture, and it was because of the way Nirvana looked and presented themselves that created this kind of unanimous support worldwide. Rock music had become kind of hedonistic – 35-year-old men taking a helicopter to the stage and dating supermodels, and going out of their way to separate themselves from their audience. Nirvana, more than any other band, rocked way harder, had significant originality, while looking like guys you went to high school with. I think that was their secret. There was an inclusion that was long overdue, and it was what rock was supposed to be about.
The legend isn't simply going to be the way that he took his life; I believe it will always be the songs.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Soundgarden Era

Life , Men , Secret , School

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Age , Family , Faith , Business

“It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 2 (p. 151)
The Birthgrave (1975)

“All legends must be based on lies, Gordon realized. We exaggerate, and even come to believe the tales, after a while.”

David Brin book The Postman

Source: The Postman (1985), Section 3, “Cincinnatus”, Chapter 18 (p. 298)

“Intellectual leadership in the eighteenth century passes from France to economically, socially and politically more progressive England. The great romantic movement starts here about the middle of the century, but the enlightenment also receives its decisive impulse from this country. The French writers of the period see in English institutions the quintessence of progress and build up a legend around English liberalism—a legend which only partly corresponds to reality. The displacement of France as the upholder of culture by England proceeds hand in hand with the decadence of the French royal house as the leading European power and, hence, the eighteenth century sees the ascent of England both in politics and in the arts and sciences.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Source: The Social History of Art, Volume III. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism, 1999, Chapter 2. The New Reading Public

Art , Reality , Decision , Science

“Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

"The Guardian profile : Tim Berners-Lee"(12 August 2005) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/aug/12/uknews.onlinesupplement

Sex , Way

“I was surprised that Godzilla was going to die on land instead of in the ocean, which was his cradle. I think it's natural for Godzilla to die because he is a living thing, but I envisioned his death differently. My idea was based on the legend of the tomb of elephants. According to the legend, when an elephant begins to feel that he is going to die, he secretly goes to the tomb. I envisioned Godzilla returning to the South Pacific when he began to feel that his end was coming. There then would have been some implication that Godzilla had died.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Death , Feeling , Idea , Nature

“But a sculpture which sets out to achieve the same ends demands an almost unbelievable effort of concentration. Practically none of the episodes or moments of such a legend, [of Prometheus ] really lends itself to sculpture, and the sculptors of the nineteenth century were often quite careless or foolish in the choice of the moment which they set out to represent. Their works could thus become cluttered with all sorts of narrative details which detract from the monumental quality of the whole... That's why, in my 'Prometheus', I represent the fire as an integral part of the presence or appearance of the hero; he stands there before us in all his awe-inspiring grandeur, a human figure that seemed in the eyes of the men who first saw him to be actually consumed by the fire that he was bearing.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 154

Men , Effort , Appearance , Parting

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Books , Age , World , Thinking

“The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in a writing by Chagall, in Chagall's early work in the Soviet Union, Alexander Kamensky; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 41
1920's

Star

“[W]e do live in a conceptual trough that encourages such yearning for unknown and romanticized greener pastures of other times. The future doesn't seem promising, if only because we can extrapolate some disquieting present trends into further deterioration: pollution, nationalism, environmental destruction, and aluminum bats. Therefore, we tend to take refuge in a rose-colored past […]. I do not doubt the salutary, even the essential, properties of this curiously adaptive human trait, but we must also record the down side. Legends of past golden ages become impediments when we try to negotiate our current dilemma.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shoemaker and Morning Star", pp. 206–207
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Age , Color , Time , Past

“I think Catholicism is actually so counter-cultural to capitalism that it’s great to get relief from that economic narrative. It’s great to go to a place where it’s all about the losers,” he says, laughing loudly. “Capitalism is all about winning and ‘be the best that you can be’. That’s a tiresome mantra. ‘I am legend’ is appropriate if you’re a superhero, but not if you’re a human.””

Tommy Tiernan (1969) Irish comedian

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/tommy-tiernan-i-love-going-to-mass-it-s-all-about-the-losers-1.3268576

Thinking

“According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter Five, Oshima

God , People , World , Time

“It was very important for me to move back to Kingsville because my work is all about the land and the terrain and the cactus and the myths and legends and people. Especially the people, the Mexican community.”

Santa Barraza (1951)

People , Communication

“It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them. Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, George Moore, came to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome. Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12.

Death , Men , Search , Personality

“Men like Adam Gilchrist (96.95), Viv Richrards (90.20) and Kapil Dev (95.07) have better strike rates than Dhoni. A few like Sachin Tendulkar (18,176), Sanath Jayasuriya (13,430) and Ricky Ponting (13,695) would always remain out of his reach by way of runs. But it's difficult to think if these legends could have donned as many hats as Dhoni does- a batsman, keeper, captain and finisher- and done as well over a period of time. He also hardly misses a game.”

MS Dhoni (1981) Indian cricket player

Times of India https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/dhoni-quotes/

Men , Way , Game , Thinking

“The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers, and hymn-singing evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected … This was so among the Christians of the first centuries who accepted Christ teachings, if not quite in its true form, at least not yet in the perverted, paganized form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale conversion of whole nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne and Vladimir, there appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ's teaching. And this Church Christianity … did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity — the direct relationship of each individual to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all people, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence — but, on the contrary, having founded a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, but not only of these divinities themselves but of their images, it made blind faith in its ordinances an essential point of its teachings.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of the Romans such as Julian and others, it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints, and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was considered bad.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Love , Life , God , People

“X-Men Legends 2, it would be so much easier to enjoy you if your characters would ever shut up.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=050920

Men

“The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Wonderful Life

Source: Wonderful Life (1989), p. 65

Death , Dogs

““Alyx,” she said, “you're going to be a legend.”
“I already am, Captain,” she said.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Chindi (2002), Chapter 34 (p. 471)

“The second level of legitimation contains theoretical propositions in a rudimentary form. Here may be found various explanatory schemes relating sets of objective meanings. These schemes are highly pragmatic, directly related to concrete actions. Proverbs, moral maxims and wise sayings are common on this level. Here, too, belong legends and folk tales, frequently transmitted in poetic forms.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 112
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“Some of my ideas certainly came from my mother's father. She and he had a family argument and didn't see each other for twenty years, though we all lived in the same town. Mother wouldn't let my grandfather in the house. She let me visit him though. He was part Indian and part French, a tiny dark-haired man with an Indian hoked-nose; tight-lipped and stubborn. But he talked to me about the spirits of the fire and the wind, and took me for long walks in a nearby woods, while he told me Indian legends.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 42

Family , Idea , Parting , Housing

“Kandinsky was an optimist; he had been interested, at first, in fairy tales and legends and chivalrous themes of the past, but he then became increasingly interested, after 1908, in formulating what he called the art of the future rather than indulging in romantic visions of the past. Kubin, on the other hand was a pessimist, always haunted by the past and suspicious of the future. This basic difference in their temperaments made their discussions all the more fruitful, and their friendship was the more intense.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 118

Friendship , Art , Past , Future

“We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science—if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Darwin at Sea—and the Virtues of Port", p. 348
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Literature , Understanding , Science

“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making 'cathedrals' out of Christ, man, or 'life', we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings..”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 2. 1943-1945, p. 127

Life , Feeling , Nostalgia , Memory

“One of the hardest-to-down myths about the evolution of mass production at Ford is one which credits much of the accomplishment to 'scientific management.' No one at Ford—not Mr. Ford, Couzens, Flanders, Wills, Pete Martin, nor I—was acquainted with the theories of the 'father of scientific management,' Frederick W. Taylor. Years later I ran across a quotation from a two-volume book about Taylor by Frank Barkley Copley, who reports a visit Taylor made to Detroit late in 1914, nearly a year after the moving assembly line had been installed at our Highland Park plant. Taylor expressed surprise to find that Detroit industrialists 'had undertaken to install the principles of scientific management without the aid of experts.' To my mind this unconscious admission by an expert is expert testimony on the futility of too great reliance on experts and should forever dispose of the legend that Taylor's ideas had any influence at Ford.”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 41

Books , Idea

“Since none of the creatures of the sea were taken on Noah's ark, there would be a strong possibility that some plesiosaurs and maybe even some ichtyosaurs survived the Flood. The violent and turbulent waters of the Flood would surely have killed and buried many of the sea creatures (over 90 percent of fossils found are of marine animals). However, if some had survived the Flood and lived on in the seas for years after, they could help account for many of the legends of sea monsters that have been gathered from all over the world. Remote as it may seem, there could even be the possibility that a few have survived till modern times. After all, it's much easier to believe that they could have survived for several thousand years rather than for nearly a hundred-million years.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! (2000)

World , Strong , Water , Time

“The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal (1954) Prisoner, Journalist, Broadcaster, Author, Activist

"A Year In: More Same Than Change" http://prisonradio.org/more_of_same.htm

War , People , Fear , Support

“It's because it's very European. And I'm Italian and it's very close to my culture and all the steppings for where all these legends took place, some places I'm very familiar with. And on the other hand, there's also something that's really special about Dracula & Array; which is the constant search for blood, which is enticing and sensual. And which is why The Count has three Brides.”

Silvia Colloca (1977) Singer, actress, author and TV cooking personality

An Interview with Dracula and his Brides (2004)

Search

“Hostility toward America is a religious duty, and we hope to be rewarded for it by God. To call us Enemy No. 1 or 2 does not hurt us. Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty. I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

In response to the interviewer stating: 'America, the world's only superpower, has called you Public Enemy Number One. Are you worried?'
1990s, Time magazine interview (1998)

God , Hostility , Hope , Confidence

“Ann Coulter has become a legend in her own mind.”

Peter T. King (1944) American politician

as quoted in Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate (2006) by Susan Estrich, p. 71.

““I’ll admit, I was disappointed to learn that dragons didn’t exist. That’s a hard lesson for a boy to learn.”
Chronicler smiled. “Honestly, I was a little disappointed myself. I went looking for a legend and found a lizard. A fascinating lizard, but a lizard just the same.””

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 6, “The Price of Remembering” (p. 46)

Smile , Disappointment , Boy , Learning