quotations about ancestry & ancestors
Nothing like blood, sir, in hosses, dawgs, and men.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.
CHARLOTTE MACLEOD
The Corpse in Oozak's Pond
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Emily Climbs
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
LIAM CALLANAN
The Cloud Atlas
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
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
He's a chip o' the old block.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
A Match at Midnight
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
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
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
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
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
PLUTARCH
On the Training of Children
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.
SALLUST
Jugurtha
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
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
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