ANCESTORS QUOTES II

quotations about ancestry & ancestors

I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.

THOMAS LIGOTTI

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe


It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.

JOHN HEYWOOD

Proverbs


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


Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.

THICH NHAT HANH

The Art of Living


He's a chip o' the old block.

WILLIAM ROWLEY

A Match at Midnight


If there be any good in nobility, I trow it to be only this, that it imposeth a necessity upon those who are noble, that they should not suffer their nobility to degenerate from the virtues of their ancestors.

BOETHIUS

De Consolatione Philosophiae


It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

PLUTARCH

On the Training of Children


We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

PAUL TSONGAS

National Journal, 1991


Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.

MATTHEW GREEN

The Spleen


Our ancestors lived for us; they died for us; and they dreamed for us. Through their collective imaginings, we were all brought into being. What an incredible honor it is for us to carry their life forward through our own.

SHERRI MITCHELL

Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change


The fairest flower
That ever blossomed on ancestral timber.

W.S. GILBERT

Ruddigore


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


Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.

GABBY RIVERA

America #7


Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.

SUZANNE COLLINS

Mockingjay


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


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


Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.

PLATO

Theaetetus


It's the land of my ancestors. I need to set my feet on that soil and see how I feel.

RUTH BEHAR

Lucky Broken Girl


Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry; and he that is not industrious envieth him that is. Besides, noble persons cannot go much higher; and he that standeth at a stay when others rise can hardly avoid motions of envy.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays


One always retains the traces of one's origin.

ERNEST RENAN

La Vie de Jésus