ANCESTORS QUOTES III

quotations about ancestry & ancestors

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

EDMUND BURKE

Reflections on the Revolution in France


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


No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.

L.M. MONTGOMERY

Emily Climbs


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 who boasts of his descent praises the deeds of another.

SENECA

Hercules Furens


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

PLATO

Theaetetus


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


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


You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.

TOBA BETA

My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut


We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.

TANYA TAGAQ

Split Tooth


Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors.

CHARLOTTE MACLEOD

The Corpse in Oozak's Pond


Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.

NORMAN DOIDGE

The Brain that Changes Itself


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


The stream is brightest at its spring,
And blood is not like wine;
Nor honored less than he who heirs
Is he who founds a line.

J.G. WHITTIER

Amy Wentworth


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


Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.

SALLUST

Jugurtha


All blood is alike ancient.

THOMAS FULLER

Gnomologia


Our ancestors are very good king of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN

The Rivals