ANCESTORS QUOTES III

quotations about ancestry & ancestors

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


You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.

TOBA BETA

My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut


Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.

TAD WILLIAMS

Shadowrise


The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.

EMILY DICKINSON

Poems


Somehow I've always had a sort of sneakin'
Idee that peddygrees is purty much
Like monkeys' tails--so long they're apt to weaken
The yap that drags 'em round.

ROBERTUS LOVE

The Boy from Hodgensville


One always retains the traces of one's origin.

ERNEST RENAN

La Vie de Jésus


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


He who boasts of his descent praises the deeds of another.

SENECA

Hercules Furens


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


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

TANYA TAGAQ

Split Tooth


The fairest flower
That ever blossomed on ancestral timber.

W.S. GILBERT

Ruddigore


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


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


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


All blood is alike ancient.

THOMAS FULLER

Gnomologia


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


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


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