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Posterity   Listen
noun
Posterity  n.  
1.
The race that proceeds from a progenitor; offspring to the furthest generation; the aggregate number of persons who are descended from an ancestor of a generation; descendants; contrasted with ancestry; as, the posterity of Abraham. "If (the crown) should not stand in thy posterity."
2.
Succeeding generations; future times. "Their names shall be transmitted to posterity." "Their names shall be transmitted to posterity."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Posterity" Quotes from Famous Books



... a little of the perfection in which the commonest lpero here works in wax. The incredible patience which enabled the ancient Mexicans to work their statues in wood or stone with the rudest instruments, has descended to their posterity, as well as their extraordinary and truly Chinese talent for imitation. With a common knife and a piece of hard wood, an uneducated man will produce a fine piece of sculpture. There is no imagination. They do not leave the beaten track, but continue ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... men act! They will not praise those who are living at the same time and living with themselves; but to be themselves praised by posterity, by those whom they have never seen or ever will see, this they set much value on. But this is very much the same as if thou shouldst be grieved because those who have lived before ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... so plainly saw the temper and disposition of his son towards women, that he did not leave him at liberty to dispose of his magic art to any but his posterity, that it might not be in the power of a wife to tease him out of it. But his caution was to very little purpose; for although my mother could not from herself exert any magic power, yet such was her unbounded ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding

... Egyptians to build up a tabernacle for my God far away from the confines of Egypt. If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I can bear it. The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity I care not which. It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... Do you remember the old story of some people who had a goose that laid golden eggs? They were greedy, and, in their besotted avarice, they killed the goose. But they have not gone down to posterity as examples of wisdom. No, Vallance, I'm ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... moments when he seems rather on a pleasure-trip than a forlorn pilgrimage in search of health. At Ryde, where, for change of air, he went ashore, he chronicles, after many discomforts from the most disobliging of landladies (let the name of Mrs. Francis go down to posterity!), "the best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal, [in a barn] with more appetite, more real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever seen in an entertainment at White's." At Torbay, he expatiates upon the merits and ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... presence of Akbar at Agra were of a very painful character. Prince Salim had from his earliest youth caused him the greatest anxiety. Nor had the anxiety been lessened as the boy approached manhood. Salim, better known to posterity as the Emperor Jahangir, was naturally cruel, and he appeared incapable of placing the smallest restraint on his passions. He hated Abulfazl, really because he was jealous of his influence with his father; avowedly because he regarded him ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson

... high degree upon the exercise of woman's power within her special kingdom of home. Indeed, Emerson says, broadly and truly, that "a sufficient measure of civilisation is the influence of good women." Posterity may be said to lie before us in the person of the child in the mother's lap. What that child will eventually become, mainly depends upon the training and example which he has received from his first and most ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... the reflections suggested to posterity by the power which popularly-elected generals began to hold from the time of the Numidian war. But such were not the reflections of Marius and his contemporaries. There was no precedent and no contemporary circumstance ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... avoiding the diseases to which they are more particularly exposed, and in laying before them such information as shall be needful, in order to the highest improvement of their physical organization, and the transmission to posterity of unimpaired constitutions. This he may do by public lectures, at suitable seasons of the year; and by visiting from house to house, and imparting such information as may be particularly needed. The physician ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... and crush the extravagances of Nestorius, broached at that time against the same adorable mystery of the Incarnation, of which God raised our holy doctor the champion in his church; for by his writings he both stifled the heresy of Nestorius in the cradle, and furnished posterity with arms against that of Eutyches, says Basil of Seleucia. (T. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... living in Yarmouth in the year 1643, removing thence to Barnstable in 1650, where he died in 1693 at the age of seventy-one. Of him it is said that "he was not a man of wealth, nor distinguished in political life," but "his character for honesty and industry he transmitted to his posterity."[7] ...
— Fifty years with the Revere Copper Co. - A Paper Read at the Stockholders' Meeting held on Monday 24 March 1890 • S. T. Snow

... cut to pieces in different parts of the kingdom! Two or three governors only refused to obey the king's orders. One of these, named Montmorrin, governor of Auvergne, wrote the king the following letter, which deserves to be transmitted to the latest posterity. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... conspire against vs, as though we were traytors and murderers of our Prince: in whose handes (as thou knowest) doth rest the life, honor and goods both of thy selfe and of vs all: and what glory and triumphe shall be reported of thee to our posterity, when they shal know how by thy obstinate crueltie, thou haste procured the death of thine old father, the death of thy hooreheaded mother, and the destruction of thy valiaunt and coragious brethren, and dispoyled the rest of thy bloud of their possessions ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter

... first conquest of the Canaries.] But truth it is that the Spanyards first conquered these Ilands, with diuers English gentlemen in their company, whose posterity this present day inioyeth them. Some write that this Iland was named Canaria by meane of the number of dogs which there were found: as for example, Andrew Theuet sayth, that one Iuba carried two dogs from thence: but that opinion could I neuer learne by any of the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... friends all over the island, and after his death the people of Calatafimi called a street by his name, the Via Samuel Butler, "thus," as Ingroja wrote when he announced the event to me, "honouring a great man's memory, handing down his name to posterity, and doing homage to the friendly English nation." Besides showing that the Odyssey was written by a woman in Sicily and translating the poem into English prose, he also translated the Iliad, and, in March, 1895, went to Greece and the Troad to see the country ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones

... from the 'Minor Poems,' now omitted, whole lines, and even passages, to the end that being placed in a fairer light, and the trash shaken from them in which they were imbedded, they may have some chance of being seen by posterity. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... "My only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... across her lap draped somewhat like that in the portrait of Lady Cockburn, and, like it, inscribed with the name of the painter, who gallantly said that "he could not resist the opportunity of going down to posterity on the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... considerable skill and vigilance to enable a man to extract a decent living from the soil of Lohm. Part of it was too boggy, and part of it too sandy, and the trees had all been cut down thirty years before by a bland grandfather, serenely indifferent to the opinion of posterity. Axel's first work had been to make plantations of young firs and pines wherever the soil was poorest, and when he rode through the beautiful Kleinwalde forest he endeavoured to extract what pleasure he ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... acknowledge more plainly than by mere reference, how much I geologically owe you. Those authors, however, who like you, educate people's minds as well as teach them special facts, can never, I should think, have full justice done them except by posterity, for the mind thus insensibly improved can hardly perceive its own upward ascent. I had intended putting in the present acknowledgment in the third part of my Geology, but its sale is so exceedingly small that I should not have had the satisfaction of thinking that as far as lay in my power ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... greater number of these generations the author is in the dark; but come what may, some of them are sure to have arrived at conclusions diametrically opposed to our own upon every subject connected with art, science, philosophy, and religion; it is plain, therefore, that if posterity is to be pleased, it can only be at the cost of repelling some present readers. Unwilling as I am to do this, I still hold it the lesser of two evils; I will be as brief, however, as the interests of the opinions ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... personal property, while the practice of auricular confession, and the doctrine of the remission of sins, gave them an opportunity of besieging the human mind in its weakest moment, and the weakest place, in order to rob posterity, and enrich the church. In the moment of weakness, when a man's mind is occupied in reflecting on the errors, and perhaps the crimes, of a long and variegated life; when his ties to this world are loosened, and his interest in ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... me serves his own salvation; therefore you have opened for yourselves the path to paradise. Fatma is my relative. But verily I say unto you that when we subjugate the whole of Egypt, then my relative and her posterity will ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... elder told, New to his fathers while they yet did hold The cities of some far-off Grecian isle, Though in the heavens the cloud of force and guile Was gathering dark that sent them o'er the sea To win new lands for their posterity. ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris

... speak, saying, 'Thou didst tell me that Thou art called Compassionate and Gracious, Longsuffering and Merciful, but as soon as I pronounced this Name before Pharaoh, misfortune descended upon the people of Israel.' Now I desire to fulfil My covenant with the three Patriarchs, and give their posterity the promised land, as a reward for the unquestioning faith of the Fathers, and also as a reward to the people, who, in spite of their suffering, did not find fault with My deeds. For this will I give them the land, which they do not deserve to possess for other reasons. ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... and my life is hers. Were I qualified to lead her armies, to steer her fleets, and deal her honest vengeance on her insulting foes;—or could my eloquence pull down a state leviathan, mighty by the plunder of his country—black with the treasons of her disgrace, and send his infamy down to a free posterity, as a monumental terror to corrupt ambition, I would be foremost in such service, and act it with the unremitting ardour of ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin

... brave landlord, may thy portly ghost Be ever ready at its heavenly post; And may thy proud posterity e'er be Landlords at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various

... with brighter faith and keener insight than any other of the early visitors to the coast, says of the country: "It has hitherto been the fate of these regions to remain unnoticed; but posterity will do them justice; towns and cities will flourish where all is now desert; the waters over which scarcely a solitary boat is yet seen to glide will reflect the flags of all nations; and a happy, prosperous people receiving with thankfulness what prodigal nature bestows for their ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind—the only revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to confound me with the common herd—she declared herself to be that very posterity for ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad

... general and specified obedience, 50 Of federal engagement among the members of the Covenanting community, 51 Of public acceptance of the truth of God and of renouncing error, 52 Performed in the name of those who engage in it, and in the name of posterity, 53 ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... distinct as to have no perceivable affinity. All, therefore, cannot be derived from the Hebrew; for it is a contradiction in terms to speak of three languages radically different, as derived from a common source. Which, then, we may well ask, is to be selected as the posterity of the Israelites: the Iroquois, the Lenape, ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... religion in that island; hence it is easy to imagine that many heathens, or baptized favourers of the old mythic songs of heathenism, may have lived in his days and imparted to him the lays of the times of old, which his unfettered mind induced him to hand down to posterity. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... and justice the English traders found their right to deprive the freeborn inhabitants of Africa of their natural liberty and native country; or on what grounds the planter afterwards founds his right to their service during life, and that of all their posterity, to the latest generation. Can the particular laws of any country supersede the general laws of nature? Can the local circumstances of any province upon earth be pled in excuse for such a violent trade, and for such endless slavery ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt

... had only dimly suspected. Dramatic enough in itself, isn't it?—if you can visualize the little dark chap. A common enough drama, too, the Lord knows. We people on top are bequeathing misery to our posterity when we let the Mortons of the world hate the rich. And head and shoulders above the other boys of his age at the school was Bewsher; not that materially, of course, there weren't others more important; Bewsher's family was old and rich as such ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... of Bandusia! Ennobled shalt thou be, For I shall sing the joys that spring Beneath yon ilex-tree. Yes, fountain of Bandusia, Posterity shall know The cooling brooks that from thy nooks ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field

... supplementary to these are only due to habit. Now, habit is continuity of action, it is a most detestable thing and is very difficult to get away from. A proverb will run where a writ will not, and the follies of our forefathers are of greater importance to us than is the well-being of our posterity." ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... of New York alone: it is the best of causes—the cause of liberty. Every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor in you the men whose verdict will have secured to us upon a firm basis—to us, to our posterity, to our neighbors, that right which both nature and the honor of our country gives us, the liberty of freely speaking and writing ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... personalities and proceedings at the Peace Conference has not been lost sight of. Very shortly a series of cinematographic films of the principal delegates and of the commissions is to be made on behalf of the British government, so that, side by side with the Treaty of Paris, posterity will be able to study the physiognomy of the men who made it."[15] In no case is it likely to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... this occasion it will not be out of place to describe some of the features of the said festival and procession, to the end that some memory of them may descend to posterity, seeing that they have now for the most part fallen into disuse. First, then, the Piazza di S. Giovanni was all covered over with blue cloth, on which were sewn many large lilies of yellow cloth; and in the middle, on certain circles also of cloth, and ten braccia in diameter, were the arms of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... find one's self at night, far from all fellow-men, in the shadow of one of those edifices raised by unknown hands, by unknown means, to an unknown end; for, despite all the wisdom of our modern inquirers, these stupendous relics remain unsolved riddles set to posterity by a mysterious people. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... consider that this poor creature, at least, understands him, and in some vague way represents the eternal but unrecognized verities. And when this is voiced by lips that are young and warm and red, it is somehow quite as convincing as the bloodless, remoter utterance of posterity. ...
— Thankful Blossom • Bret Harte

... done nothing for me, and I will do nothing for posterity, is his principle," said Julius. "Moreover, he ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... let it pass as mine, for the time, but I never intended to wear the laurel crown, really. I only borrowed it for a little while. I hope you can make Mr. Bennett behave himself and put his brand on it, for if he doesn't it will go down to posterity unsigned. This other—'The Spoils of Victory'—he cannot attempt to disown, for I was away at Great Falls when he painted it, and he was here alone, so far as help of any kind is concerned. Now do make ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... popularity of any part of the productions of one, broken, by suffering long before taken by death, it is nevertheless to be presumed that posterity will award to his works an estimation of a far higher character, of a much more earnest nature, than has hitherto been awarded them. A high rank must be assigned by the future historians of music to one who distinguished himself ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... transfer to paper all the conceptions that crowd his busy brain. In January, 1876, he remarked to a friend, "Were I to begin giving to the world my unpublished and completed works, I could issue a new volume monthly for a year." Among these treasures for posterity are to be found the tragedies of Torquemada and the Twins (the Iron Mask); the comedies of the Grandmother, The Sword, and perchance The Brother of Gavroche; a fairy piece wherein the flowers and trees play speaking parts; volumes of poems entitled The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... "There's some weeks afore town meetin' day. This is a serious business. We can't have no more—I mean no unsuitable man to fill such an important place as that. The welfare of our posterity," he added, and we all recognized the quotation, "depends upon the ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... own fine or refined things. Again, our author suggests another criterion. We are, as in Lamb's phrase, "to write for antiquity," with the souls of poets dead and gone for our judges. But we are also to write for the future, asking with what feelings posterity will read us—if it reads us at all. This is a good discipline. We know by practice what will hit some contemporary tastes; we know the measure of smartness, say, or the delicate flippancy, or the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... the pasquinades, lampoons, squibs, and caricatures (many of them far from flattering, and others verging on the indecent) that appeared and have them sumptuously bound. It was not long before enough had been assembled to fill half a dozen volumes. His idea was "to preserve for posterity all this mountain of mud, as a witness of Bavaria's shame." That somebody else was responsible for the "shame" did not ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... towns, and of abundance of villages, turning the poor people out of their habitations and possessions, and laying all open for his deer. The same histories likewise record that two of his own blood and posterity, and particularly his immediate successor William Rufus, lost their lives in this forest—one, viz., the said William Rufus, being shot with an arrow directed at a deer which the king and his company were hunting, and the arrow, ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe

... justified and saved. Not because he left his country, his relatives, his father's house; not because he was circumcised; not because he stood ready to sacrifice his own son Isaac in whom he had the promise of posterity. Abraham was justified because he believed. Paul's argumentation runs like this: "Since this is the unmistakable testimony of Holy Writ, why do you take your stand upon circumcision and the Law? Was not Abraham, your father, of whom you make so much, justified and saved without circumcision ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... discontent will appear unworthy of attention, and, with hearts of thankfulness to that divine Being who has filled our cup of prosperity, we shall feel our resolution strengthened to preserve and hand down to our posterity that liberty and that union which we have received from our fathers, and which constitute the sources and the shield of all ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson

... What will posterity do in face of the rising tide of a barbarous vocabulary which, under the pretence of progress, stifles real knowledge? It will relegate the whole business to the quagmire of oblivion. But what will never disappear is the popular name, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... muzzled for thinking his thoughts, he may die and with him the truth to which he gave but silent birth. But the world comes, by its slower progress, to traverse the path in which he wished to lead it; and if so be that his thought was recorded, posterity revives it in ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... 'salon' as this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently intending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as "John Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and magazines," or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... In the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has commended her to posterity. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... natural history of the several places that had been visited, as would justly have entitled him to very high commendation. The proofs of his abilities that now remain, will hand down the name of Anderson, in conjunction with that of Cook, to posterity. Soon after he had breathed his last, land having been seen at a distance, which was supposed to be an island, our commander honoured it with the appellation of Anderson's Island. The next day he removed Mr. Law, the surgeon of the Discovery, into the Resolution, and appointed ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis

... the first performance of those symphonies of Beethoven which seem to us as eternal as the mountains. Losing the effluence of his personal presence, which his neighbors and countrymen enjoyed, we demand the privilege of posterity to hear and tell all that can be told of him. We can wait fifty years more for a biography of Allston, because something of his gracious presence yet lingers among us; but we can touch Scheffer only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... before the criminal tribunal who had advised him to accede to such a proposal, on reflecting how much his dignity had suffered by the compliance; and that the records of the country might hand it down to posterity, as an event that had tarnished the lustre of his reign, being nothing short of breaking through an ancient custom, and adopting one of a barbarous nation in its place. Deodato thought even that its ill effects might extend to them, as Europeans, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... Saturday night, as his father had done before him, sang no more at the bottom of the garden steps, where Sophie always feared he would break his neck. The path was undoubtedly an ancient right of way, and at 10.45 P.M. on Saturdays Skim remembered it was his duty to posterity to keep it open—till Mrs. Cloke spoke to him once. She spoke likewise to her daughter Mary, sewing maid at Pardons, and to Mary's best new friend, the five-foot-seven imported London house-maid, who taught Mary to trim hats, ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... even forgotten the manner of his death, though probably no young writer with an eye on posterity ever had a better send-off. We really thought at the time that Tommy had found ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie

... mouth, happy-go-lucky, spending and enjoying in time of abundance, suffering in time of poverty and stress, making no provision even for their own future, still less recognizing any duty to their country or to posterity to produce economically and regulate their expenditure wisely so as to carry forward a surplus. As far as this majority is concerned we might yet be living among rocks and trees, without shelter, lacking sure supplies of food, with fig leaves to cover our nakedness. And to-day the same conditions ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman

... therefore humbly pray this honored Court that something may be publicly done to take off infamy from the names and memory of those who have suffered as aforesaid, that none of their surviving relations nor their posterity may suffer reproach ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... is, I think, something like this. One considerable writer gets a sort of start because what he writes is somewhat more—only a little more very often, as I believe—congenial to the minds around him than any other sort. This writer is very often not the one whom posterity remembers—not the one who carries the style of the age farthest towards its ideal type, and gives it its charm and its perfection. It was not Addison who began the essay-writing of Queen Anne's time, but Steele; it was the vigorous forward man who struck out the rough notion, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... house in St. John's parish. As his fame is yet but indistinctly known, and much of that through the medium of fable, the present attempt has been made to arrest its progress, to do honour to his memory, and to transmit his example to posterity. ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James

... die is cast; the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity. I care not which. It may well wait a century for a reader, since God has waited six thousand years for an observer ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... of Boston bestowed a great blessing upon American posterity when she induced her good man, Thomas Fleet, to publish, in 1719, "The Mother Goose Melodies," many of which rhymes dated back to a similar publication printed in London two hundred years before. Is it strange that, ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various

... that, though Macbeth should be king, yet not his children, but the children of Banquo, should be kings after him. The thought of this, and that they had defiled their hands with blood, and done so great crimes, only to place the posterity of Banquo upon the throne, so rankled within them, that they determined to put to death both Banquo and his son, to make void the predictions of the weird sisters, which in their own case had been so remarkably ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... the Grand Act is a snare and a delusion. Whatever may happen hereafter—even the Grand Act itself—posterity is likely to look back upon August, 1914, as the moment when the British Empire reached the zenith of its unity. Let us remember that the existing system is not stationary, though its principle (voluntary union) may be final. It has been ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... dead at last. Trollope has got his living, worth L1000 a-year net. See, thou sluggard, thou heretic-sluggard, what mightest thou not have arrived at! Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... concerning his history; he asked to see them and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places, but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his enemy. "Since you have preserved my narration," said he, "I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity." ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

... of Nature has established it, that if every other vicious act were to escape its merited punishment in this world, the one in question could not. Whatever its votaries may think, it never fails, in a single instance, to injure them, personally; and consequently their posterity, should ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... to his descendants the untarnished name of a gallant soldier and gentleman, who never faltered in the pursuit of his high ideals of duty. Brief as had been his career as a general in the Revolution, his memory is still cherished by a grateful posterity, as one of the first heroes of that mighty struggle ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... little by his subservience to Rome. For twenty years his life had been filled with labors and perils. His armies had been wasted and his treasuries drained by a long and fruitless struggle; and now, after reigning one year, he died, leaving his kingdom on the brink of civil war, and bequeathing to posterity a name branded ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... The posterity of Marmaduke did not escape the common lot of those who depend rather on their hereditary possessions than on their own powers; and in the third generation they had descended to a point below which, in this happy country, it is barely possible for honesty, intellect ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... Haran. And thence, after the death of his father, he removed into this land in which you now live. [7:5]And [God] gave him no inheritance in it, not the breadth of a foot, and promised to give it to him for a possession, and to his posterity after him, when as yet he had no son. [7:6]And God said thus; that his posterity should be a stranger in a foreign land, and they shall enslave it and treat it injuriously four hundred years; [7:7]and the nation which they shall serve will I judge, said God, ...
— The New Testament • Various

... sacred sea of the old poets and philosophers, on the sea whose voice has rocked the thought of the world, that he cast into the shadow that long lament, so heartrending and sublime, that posterity will long shudder at the remembrance of it. The bitter strophes of this lament seem to be cadenced by the Mediterranean itself and to be in ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... blinked, came to his senses and marched himself off to the prison on the lonely promontory called the Queen's Bower, saying ferociously, "Jouk, Sir Joseph, and I'll blaw you into posterity." ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... trunk with festoons of tasseled and twisted rice-straw. Long after, when by the storms of centuries the old pine, in spite of bandages and crutches, and tired of wrestling with the blast, fell down like an old man, to rise no more, a grateful posterity cleared the space and built the shrine of Miwo, which still dots with its sacred enclosure the strand of Suruga on which ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis

... knowledge of antiquity themselves, can impart none to those who come after them. Or if among the survivors there chance to be one possessed of such knowledge, to give himself consequence and credit, he will conceal and pervert it to suit his private ends, so that to his posterity there will remain only so much as he may have been pleased ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... important truth in going back to the most remote antiquity, and the origin of profane history; I mean, to the dispersion of the posterity of Noah into the several countries of the earth where they settled. Liberty, chance, views of interest, a love for certain countries, and similar motives, were, in outward appearance, the only causes of ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... some among them, such as Simeon and Anna, noticed in the Gospel of Luke, [10:3] who were taught of God, and who exhibited a spirit of vital piety. "The law of the Lord is perfect converting the soul," and as the books of the Old Testament were committed to the keeping of the posterity of Abraham, there were "hidden ones" here and there who discovered the way to heaven by the perusal of these "lively oracles." We have reason to believe that the Jews were faithful conservators of the inspired volume, as Christ ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... reasoning or calculating. Variable as the beauty of a fair woman, Diard was a great boaster and a great talker, talking of everything. He said he was artistic, and he made prizes (like two celebrated generals) of works of art, solely, he declared, to preserve them for posterity. His military comrades would have been puzzled indeed to form a correct judgment of him. Many of them, accustomed to draw upon his funds when occasion obliged them, thought him rich; but in truth, he was a gambler, and gamblers may be said to have nothing of their own. Montefiore was also a gambler, ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of a great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were not his devotees, but his instruments,—his own glory was the god of his idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me with perfumes, crown me with ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... in a line the wisdom of ages, could never have kept him quiet when an attack was made upon himself. A popular writer has always immense odds in his favor in any controversy he may have with inferior men. He is ordinarily sure of the verdict of posterity, for his is likely to be the only side that will reach its ears. Even during his own time there will always be a large body of admirers who will defend him with more fervor, and advocate his cause with more ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... painted corridors from the office to his room. With all his eccentricities, he was a devout man, conscientious and brave. He lived in domestic peace and honor all his days, and dying, he and his wife, whom he had married almost in childhood, left a posterity of 129 direct descendants to mourn them. [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote (1) relocated to ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... life has been one long experience of the substantial justice of the laws by which this world is governed, and he will calmly trust to them still as he lays his head down for his long sleep." Let that also stand as the estimate of Wallace by his contemporaries, an estimate which we believe posterity will confirm. And to it we may add that death, which came to him in his sleep as a gentle deliverer, opened the door into the larger and fuller life into which he tried to penetrate and in which he firmly believed. If that faith be founded in truth, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... been lopped off for an offence into which he had been hurried by his intemperate zeal, waved his hat with the hand which was still left him, and shouted "God save the Queen!" The sentiment with which these men regarded her has descended to their posterity. The Nonconformists, rigorously as she treated them, have, as a body, always venerated her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... discover the true constitution of that republic which once ruled the destinies of the known world, and the influence of whose literature and laws is still powerful in every civilized state, and will probably continue to be felt to the remotest posterity. These discoveries have, however, been hitherto useless to junior students in this country; the works of the German critics being unsuited to the purposes of schools, not only from their price, but also from the extensive learning ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... his descendants, as to turn his back on a constitution that is thoroughly and inherently English, a constitution that he has inherited from his ancestors, and which by every obligation both human and divine he is bound to transmit unchanged to posterity";—here the orator, who continued to speak, however, was deafened by shouts of applause, and that part of the subject might very fairly be considered as ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... original was a Greek play, Karchedonios, the author of which is unknown, as the fragments of Menander's Karchedonios do not fit in with Plautus' play. The play was called by Plautus 'Patruus,' but posterity went back to the older ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton

... withdrawing from college, often leave in the room which they last occupied, pictures, looking-glasses, chairs, &c., there to remain, and to be handed down to the latest posterity. Articles ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... blood put in my veins that never rose up in them by birth. You to have put a slur maybe on the whole of my posterity for ever. That now is a ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory

... honours and titles. But Neuchatel declined these overtures. He was one of those strong minds who will concentrate their energies on one object; without personal vanity, but with a deep-seated pride in the future. He was always preparing for his posterity. Governed by this passion, although he himself would have been content to live for ever in Bishopsgate Street, where he was born, he had become possessed of a vast principality, and which, strange to say, with every advantage of splendour and natural beauty, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... nature and man from which it is heresy to dissent. The rise of their school marks an intellectual advance as compared with the lettered age of the T'angs. It was an age of daring speculation; but, as constantly happens in China, the authority of these great men was converted into a bondage for posterity. The century in which they flourished (1020-1120) is unique in the history of their country as the age of philosophy. In Europe it was a part of the Dark Ages; and at that time the Western world ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... that the Union would be held together. Such was the dream of the unselfish patriots who ruled the destinies of the infant Republic. Such were the ideas that so far influenced their deliberations that, with all their wisdom, they left a legacy to their posterity which deluged ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... itself immediately with the mission and work of Christ. It was made with Abraham, not for himself and his posterity alone, but for all mankind: "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." Gen. 22:18. And if the Abrahamic covenant had respect to the whole human family, the same must be true of the Mosaic economy in its ultimate design; since this did not abrogate the covenant ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... down with the property; but if it were personally known to belong to Mr. Fuller or Lord Quarryman, whose estates abutted on Worsted Skeynes, and there was grave and imminent danger of its going back, it was promptly shot and stuffed, that it might not be lost to posterity. An encounter with another landowner having the same hobby, of whom there were several in his neighbourhood, would upset him for a week, making him strangely morose, and he would at once redouble his efforts to add something rarer than ever to his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... begun by his celebrated grandfather, the Emperor Kang Hi (1661-1721); and it so chanced that the particular Tartar horde which now, in 1771, had marched all the way from the shores of the Caspian to appeal to him for protection and for annexation to the Chinese Empire were but the posterity of a horde who had formerly belonged to that Empire, but had detached themselves from it, in the reign of Kang Hi, by a contrary march westward to annex themselves to the Russian dominions. The event of 1771, therefore, was gratifying to Kien Long as completing his independent exertions ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... perceive that no body of young people ever had a more valuable inheritance than that which we have received; and we are under the greatest obligations to protect and preserve this land, and transmit it, full of the grandest achievements and most glorious recollections, to posterity. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... on the mother's side had always some influence with her. Francis Knolles who had married into this family, and was appointed by the Queen treasurer of her household, won himself a good name with his contemporaries and with posterity by his religious zeal and openness of heart. A still more important figure in this circle is Thomas Sackville, who is also named with honour among the founders of English literature; the part of ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... of being blessed with the sight of the new-born king: that, on their entering the royal city, they shall in every street and corner hear the acclamations of a happy people, and learn with ease the way to the royal palace, made famous to all posterity by the birth of their king and Saviour. But to their great surprise there appears not the least sign of any such solemnity. The court and city go quietly on in seeking their pleasure and profit! ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... Lockhart. All such matter would make your edition more valuable; and I see no reason why you should be bound by the deference to living connections of the family that may prevent the English publishers from inserting these particulars. We stand in the light of posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity.... I should be glad to know something of the personal character and life of his eldest son, and whether (as I have heard) he was ashamed of his father for being a literary man. In short, fifty pages devoted to such elucidation ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... session of the Thirty-ninth Congress proposed, as their plan of Reconstruction, a Constitutional Amendment. It was a bond of public justice and public safety combined, to be embodied in our national Constitution, to show to our posterity that patriotism is a virtue and rebellion is a crime. These terms were more magnanimous than were ever offered in any country under like circumstances. They were kind, they were forbearing, they were less than we had ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... that subject-matter in which it is infallible, or the formal conditions of the exercise of that gift may be wanting, it is clearly the duty of authority to act vigorously in the case. Yet that act will go down to posterity as an instance of a tyrannical interference with private judgment, and of the silencing of a reformer, and of a base love of corruption or error; and it will show still less to advantage, if the ruling power happens in ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman

... difficult task indeed before you, for worse is to come. Any child that is born of that marriage—if even a girl—is to inherit the thrones of both England and France, and this double ownership is to remain with its posterity forever!" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... seriously as a profession, I might in time possibly have made five hundred a year off the magazines, and won an humble place among our seven hundred rising authors. What's the good of that, when one is not a transcendent genius, destined for posterity? The crowd seems to be thickest just there: too many books, too many writers, and by far too many anxious aspirants. Why should I swell the number? The community was not especially pining to hear what I might have to say; and I ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... before he could be born, Leapt in the womb, his joy to prophesy: Old Anna, though with age all spent and worn, Proclaims her Saviour to posterity: And Simeon fast his dying notes doth ply. Oh, how the blessed souls about him trace! It is the fire of heaven thou dost embrace: Sing, Simeon, sing; sing, Simeon, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Africa and the West India Islands, but also are very prolific among themselves; and they that are born here talk good English and affect our Language, Habits and Customs.... Their work or Chimerical (hard Slavery) is not very laborious; their greatest Hardship consisting in that they and their Posterity are not at their own Liberty or Disposal, but are the Property of their Owners; and when they are free they know not how to provide so well for themselves generally; neither did they live so plentifully nor (many of them) so easily in their own Country ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston



Words linked to "Posterity" :   biological group, descendants, generation



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