The Legacy Letters Quotes

It's through traveling you make the great journey into yourself, and it's the clarity of extremes in traveling that forces you to meet yourself like you've never met yourself before.

Enjoy what you are learning and doing. This is one of the hardest concepts in the entire world to understand. Harder yet to put into practice.

Read what you like, not what you're told to like. That way you'll read for a lifetime.

It is you who must someday break through the protective polish of who you are, to become naked and powerful to who you can truly be.

How much better does being alive get then sitting beside a warm fire amidst a misty rainy morning.

When do you become a man? When you become your own man. When other men trust you to do a man's work. Trust you with their name, their reputation, their thoughts. Trust you to watch their backs and trust you with their lives.

My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all . . .

Money can buy you everything to fill your time but it cannot buy time itself. And things are definitely not time.

But more importantly in my book of life, it's what you can't buy with money that is often more important than what you can buy.

Wake up. Be thankful. For whatever happens on this day, you are endlessly given the chance to start again-to be alive. And all of us should wish for that.

Only you can know the difference between your wants and your needs, and your sacrifice of your life's time to both.

Your time is your time. Be awake to it. It's hard work to be wisely alive.

I want to remember warming your two a.m. bottle, clipping your locks, watching you be baptized, bathing you in the big porcelain sink… how I often laid you against my chest and felt the cradlesong of your tiny breaths as you fell asleep . . .

Eat Ice Cream. Read Books. Be Happy.

No one OWES you a THING. So don’t EXPECT it. You’re on your OWN.

Take off my clothes and there becomes a man. Take off my skin and there becomes my bones. Break all my bones and there becomes my heart. Smash my heart and there becomes my soul. And that you cannot take. And what is my soul?...It is everything that make a man. It is everything that makes this man.

Heavy rains and a good book. A perfect extravagance.

Marriage is not the beginning of the journey, nor the end - it is the journey.

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

Why read? Because books are precious guides to our humanity—civilization’s backbone—that tenuous ridgeline that allows us to climb above the jungle and see what the horizon has to offer. Thus they represent the yearning to go beyond, to explore. Yet they are also human-sized. And made of paper and ink, and thus they come from the earth. Their physicality is what makes them immensely human. And they contain the flesh-and-bone thoughts of one person capturing one blink of time, now made immortal in the bound pages carried by your own hands and touched by your own eyes. How can such fragile and thin paper and spidery veins of ink be our most precious treasure, binding together the entire hope and legacy and language of a civilization—of our existence. We touch the book and turn the page, and thus we are bound to our destiny.

Be the greatest of who you were meant to be. Life goes on ferociously-with or without you. It is your choice. Truly and magnificently your choice.

HungerYou are only here now, and then you are gone. So be hungry. Hunger toward beauty. Hunger toward love. Hunger towards the unimaginable and unthinkable.

I can FEEL her next to me. This UNION. Of WARMTH. Of CARING. Of the INDESCRIBABLE. As if there were NO PARTING and NEVER could be.

A good man lives for the joy in life and the happiness of being alive, not shackled to the wants of the future or the regrets of the past.

You might want more time in your life to attempt the things you like to do, and not just perform the things you have to do.

Love your kids and just be there for them. You don’t have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that’s too much.

Respect both what you need to know and what you don't need to know. Respect mystery, for mystery is still needed to run the universe." -- The Legacy Letters, by Carew Papritz"Things I didn't know.

Reading teaches us the nuances of humanity. To find the beauty of what is moral and ethical in your own actions and discover the strange subtlety of what it is to question why you should exist.

Remember, Little Ones, everything is not important all the time. Only living is important all the time. Not things. Not money. Not more things and more endless money. Spend well the quality of your time. And yes, be greedy with your hours. If only to then give those hours away as the most precious gifts you have to offer to yourself, your family, and your friends. And yes, to my Little Ones.” –From The Legacy Letters–“The Everything and Nothing of Money.

Sometimes the best way is to get out of your own way.

Money can buy you knowledge, but not the wisdom to use it wisely.

In reality, Little Ones, there are two winters. One made for kids; the other for adults. The one made for adults is always too cold and always too long. The one made for kids is always perfect. A kid winter is an endless and wild snow carnival where all the rides are free.

There's so much to learn. So much to enjoy. So terribly much to be curious about. Take your life and run with it. Make a habit of being alive. This much of anything, I have learned. And am still learning.

Get someone-anyone-to read books to you. Having books read to you at any age is the supremo ultimato of living.

It’s a heck of a responsibility to look after a spirit. So give kids the best of who you are. That’s the most you can ever do.

I remember once kissing you, your face lit by northern stars. Promising to grow old with you, and now so simply breaking the promise.

Be generous with your life - love deeply, honestly, and without reservation.

Sometimes we make being happy so difficult. And being thankful such a chore.

Rain with no shoes is just as much fun as rain with big rubber galoshes.

Living isn't always red bows and birthday balloons.

Money - it can buy you a moment of glee but not a lifetime of happiness.

There are hard days to live. You awake to a day when you feel you've done it all before, and you're going to do it again, so why do it at all.

Kids are kids and not little adults. They're watching and listening to you all the time. They're figuring out the game plan but still don't know all the rules. Talk straight to them and they'll respect you for it.

Summer, dropping so easily a delicious everything upon your skin and lips. Like a never-ending kiss - taunting, deep, and luscious.

Don’t have kids until you’re ready. And when you do have them, have them all the way. They aren’t like some Cadillac that you can turn back into the dealership after three years.

MUSIC. Tunneling right down into your CORE and SOULTIME. Hep, sloppy, SEXY and cerebral. Chancy and hip-swinging like ELVIS and your first teenage KISS.

The Number One Rule of Working Is: DO THE BEST WORK YOU CAN. Why do anything but your best? What's the point?

Enjoy the RIDE NOW. You'll be SUCCESSFUL later, however YOU define SUCCESS.

So curious you must be. Like little calves poking their heads through the fence with big eyes and a headful of curiosity.

Remember, it’s still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you’d have nothing to look forward to. Besides, to be wise and eighteen is as possible as catching lightning in a bottle…

Remember, it's still a mystery to be an adult. If you knew it all before eighteen, you'd have nothing to look forward to.

Make doing your best a habit, and you’ll never know not doing your best.

No, you become a man when you first decide to put away the things of childhood, the talk of childhood, and the thoughts of childhood. You decide because you cannot be treated as both a man and a boy. Because you are either one or the other, but you are not both . . .

While all the universe and my family are still sleeping, I will walk among the red and blue twinkle-lights of the living room, to sit and gaze upon the pretty white angel atop the tree and say silent prayers, remembering what was good in the world and why I was brought here to remember.

These Moments Cascade Upon One Another"Here at shepherd's dusk, in a valley without echo, I listen for you. With a frayed longing, I hear your shadow voice whispering within me from far away. I grasp at what is left of this husky sun lying golden upon the upper meadows of lodge pole and bear grass. I gather the last remnants of the evening's breeze, so cool and lazy within my arms, feeling it curl up like a small and innocent kitten. And I see that behind a cloak of clouds, dalliance suits the canting moon. Suddenly I do not wish to lose another moment, And I covet all pristine light.

I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends.

I want to remember...Smelling your newness upon this earth. The baby-Jesus smell as Grandma used to put it. Pure. Unsullied. Like the imagined smell in the twirling air of eiderdown feathers spin-floating around the yard on a new spring day.

Marriage is love put to it's ultimate test - the grindstone of life. Where the idealism of love meets the everydayness of marriage.

Starting the day—Another chance to be new again. How many of us still wish for that? To be your own sunrise. To awaken like a prayer—both solemn and joyful at still being alive . . .

There are hard days to live. And sometimes they will be just a few, and sometimes they will seem endless. And eventually you'll come to understand that we've all been there before - or more than likely are going there now. And maybe that idea will make it easier for you, and maybe it won't. But there will still be hard days to live, and you will still have to find your way through them.