Abraham Lincoln:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here...
John Barth:
In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.As poet, this Ebenezer was not better nor worse than his fellows, none of whom left behind him anything nobler than his own posterity...
George Eliot:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for 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, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Emanuel Swedenborg:
He is born to few things who thinks only of his own age. Many thousands f years and of people are yet to come. Look to these even thoughh some cause has imposed silence on your contemporaries.
and take a look at Carolyn Blackmer's legacy