Posterity will pay every one his due. [ Tac ]

The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander. [ Landor ]

It is not your posterity, but your actions, that will perpetuate your memory. [ Proverb ]

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. [ Burke ]

We should not pass from the earth without leaving traces to carry our memory to posterity. [ Napoleon I ]

Glory is a shroud that posterity often tears from the shoulders of those who wore it, when living. [ Beranger ]

It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. [ Lowell ]

Contemporaries appreciate the man rather than the merit; posterity will regard the merit rather than the man. [ Charles Buxton ]

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity. [ Ben Jonson ]

Of all the rewards of virtue, the most splendid is fame, for it is fame alone that can offer us the memory of posterity. [ Cicero ]

The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither their good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity. [ Sallust ]

It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age. [ Addison ]

Truth, like the Venus de Medici, will pass down in thirty fragments to posterity; but posterity will collect and recompose them into a goddess. [ Richter ]

Books are the legacies that genius leaves to mankind, to be delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those that are yet unborn. [ Addison ]

The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end. [ Colton ]

A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principle has taken full effect on this state favorite. [ Isaac Disraeli ]

Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself. [ Buffon ]

There is a certain virtue in every good man, which night and day stirs up the mind with the stimulus of glory, and reminds it that all mention of our name will not cease at the same time with our lives, but that our fame will endure to all posterity. [ Cicero ]

A man who cannot win fame in his own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of commonsense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery? [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Talk, except as the preparation for work, is worth almost nothing; sometimes it is worth infinitely less than nothing; and becomes, little conscious of playing such a fatal part, the general summary of pretentious nothingnesses, and the chief of all the curses the posterity of Adam are liable to in this sublunary world. [ Carlyle ]

When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself. [ Macaulay ]