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
All blood is alike ancient.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
LIAM CALLANAN
The Cloud Atlas
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
EMILY DICKINSON
Poems
The fairest flower
That ever blossomed on ancestral timber.
W.S. GILBERT
Ruddigore
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
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
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
You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.
TOBA BETA
My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.
TAD WILLIAMS
Shadowrise
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
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
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
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
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
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