quotations about ancestry & ancestors
Nothing like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, and men.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Emily Climbs
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.
CHARLOTTE MACLEOD
The Corpse in Oozak's Pond
Each of us is entitled to claim the forebears who suit him, who explain him in his own eyes. How often have I not changed ancestors!
EMIL M. CIORAN
Drawn and Quartered
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
He's a chip o' the old block.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
A Match at Midnight
Here and there a cotter's babe is royal-born by right divine;
Here and there my lord is lower than his oxen or his swine.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
LIAM CALLANAN
The Cloud Atlas
A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?
WALLACE STEGNER
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
There's something about doing things the way our ancestors used to do them that kind of puts your heart back into the rhythm of this thing called life.
JOANNA GAINES
The Magnolia Story
A plaited link exists between every person and his or her ancestors, not simply through genealogical records, but in the same manner that the soul of a child, from which we sprang from, traces a direct connection to the matured soul of the adult.
KILROY J. OLDSTER
Dead Toad Scrolls
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
PLUTARCH
On the Training of Children
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
JAMES G. LEYBURN
The Scotch-Irish: A Social History
Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.
SALLUST
Jugurtha
Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as "the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company of his descendants.
LEWIS SPENCE
British Fairy Origins
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs