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
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
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors.
NORMAN DOIDGE
The Brain that Changes Itself
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
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
Whatever my ancestors did to you, none of them consulted me.
TAD WILLIAMS
Shadowrise
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
Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.
ROBIN JARVIS
The Oaken Throne
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
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
He who boasts of his descent praises the deeds of another.
SENECA
Hercules Furens
No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Emily Climbs
All blood is alike ancient.
THOMAS FULLER
Gnomologia
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
EMILY DICKINSON
Poems
Ancestral glory is, as it were, a lamp to posterity.
SALLUST
Jugurtha