Top 100 Quotes About Ancestors
#1. In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.
James E. Faust
#2. They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.
Nayomi Munaweera
#3. I should like to know if he has sunk a frigate, alone, with a Fleur-de-Nuit on his back; and as for distinction, my ancestors were scholars in China while his were starving in pits.
Naomi Novik
#4. But because their ancestors were men of righteousness, shall we consent to the abuses of their degenerate descendants? Because they did us a great good, would we be guilty if we prevented them from doing us evil?
Jose Rizal
#5. When the light that kisses the back of her eyes were birthed, her ancestors were not yet born. How many human lives have ended in the time it took that light to reach her?
How many people have loved only to have lost? How countless, the hopes that have died?
But not this one.
Amie Kaufman
#6. Return to the land of your fathers; blood calls to blood.
Horton Deakins
#7. I say, then, that hereditary States, accustomed to the family of their Prince, are maintained with far less difficulty than new States, since all that is required is that the Prince shall not depart from the usages of his ancestors, trusting for the rest to deal with events as they arise.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#8. Your creativity is way older than you are, way older than any of us. Your very body and your very being are perfectly designed to live in collaboration with inspiration, and inspiration is still trying to find you - the same way it hunted down your ancestors.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#9. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Stephen Jay Gould
#10. Earth fell," said the Surgeon, "because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.
Robert Silverberg
#11. Today the major reason for our interest in Flatland is that for the first time we can achieve some of the dreams of our ancestors a century ago and obtain direct visual experience of phenomena in a dimension higher than our own.
Thomas Banchoff
#12. We investigate, we prepare, we execute. We find them, we take them down, and then we piss on their ancestors' graves.
Lee Child
#13. If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#14. Right here, right now? This is precious. This is life. You're alive. Somehow, all of the genetic material of all those thousands of ancestors came together in the perfect combination to make you, exactly as you are. That's magical - it's the greatest kind of magic I know. Our very existence." My
Loretta Lost
#15. The time and intelligence that our ancestors spent on understanding the sovereignty revealed in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are directed by our contemporaries in affirming and validating the sovereignty of our needs, wants, and feelings.
Eugene H. Peterson
#16. Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.
Joan D. Vinge
#17. Because survival and love are the immortal truths of humankind, no generation is a total stranger to the forerunner generations of humankind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#18. At times is it seems that I am living my life backward, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles. Wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
Andre Gide
#19. {In the shadows where the ancestors sleep, the bird's song is young, but all else is old. Stillness surrounds me and I breathe softly expecting the unexpected.} from book in progress
Nancy B. Brewer
#20. I brought a Border Collie back home to Vancouver from Wales - where some of my ancestors are from - and needed to challenge him in other ways than just being my pet. So I investigated sheep herding and took a few lessons, and decided I was probably learning more than my dog!
Jane Siberry
#21. The good old home habits of our ancestors are breaking up - it will be well if our virtue and our freedom do not follow them!
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#22. When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.
Richard Dawkins
#23. Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Alan Dundes
#24. My ancestors further back than the first Roman were Hebrews." "The stubborn pride of thy race is not lost in thee," said Arrius, observing a flush upon the rower's face. "Pride is never so loud as when in chains." "What cause hast thou for pride?" "That I am a Jew." Arrius smiled.
Lew Wallace
#25. We are all motivated far more than we care to admit by characteristics inherited from our ancestors which individual experiences of childhood can modify, repress, or enhance, but cannot erase.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll
#26. A bit of mist and light suffice for life to overpower nothingness. A bit of hope and time suffice for you to cross the mountain trails of myth; you were spared the fate of your ancestors. So borrow the wisdom of the anemones and say: Nothingness does not concern me, even if death besieges me.
Mahmoud Darwish
#27. This tottered ensign of my ancestors
Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer,
Will I advance upon these castle-walls.
Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,
And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
Christopher Marlowe
#28. The secret to good health is to behave like your ancestors did before the Industrial Revolution.
Steven Magee
#29. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru)
Carolina De Robertis
#30. Much to my surprise, as I set them free, I was able to forgive myself for the judgments I had made about them. I now hold them in a loving space in my heart and honor them as my ancestors who love me and guide me each day.
Iyanla Vanzant
#31. Generational change within a genre is hard to parse while it's happening. Only in retrospect can the passing of the baton from ancestors to progeny be clearly discerned.
Paul Di Filippo
#32. You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.
Bruce Feiler
#33. In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.
S. Jay Olshansky
#34. When two sides who consider each other enemies converge in armed struggle, for the moment they are no longer enemies. They are fellow human beings who face the same two choices that their ancestors did for centuries before them: to destroy each other or to prosper together.
Thomas Huynh
#35. Our ancestors took this land. They took it and made it and held it. We do not give up what our ancestors gave us. They came across the sea and they fought here, and they built here and they're buried here. This is our land, mixed with our blood, strengthened with our bone. Ours!
Bernard Cornwell
#36. Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Carl Jung
#37. There are things in life that science will never be able to see. We have to rely on what has been passed from our ancestors, generation to generation.
Pawan Mishra
#38. That's why we sail. So our children can grow up and be proud of whom they are. We are healing our souls by reconnecting to our ancestors. As we voyage we are creating new stories within the tradition of the old stories, we are literally creating a new culture out of the old.
Nainoa Thompson
#39. No, he wasn't letting Dez MacDermot get away. He'd take her down like his ancestors took down full-grown zebra.
Shelly Laurenston
#40. The true God is to be venerated in obscure and fearful Places, with Horror in their Approaches, and thus did our Ancestors worship the Daemon in the form of great Stones.
Peter Ackroyd
#41. I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
Alice Walker
#42. Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.
Douglas Adams
#43. A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#44. I'm made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my ancestors. They're in the way I look, in the color of my hair. And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think. So who is
Terry Pratchett
#45. People who brag of their ancestors are like root vegetables. All their importance is underground.
Winston Graham
#46. I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.
Rosanne Cash
#47. But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James Henry Breasted
#48. Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
Steven Pinker
#49. It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents.
Stephen Hawking
#50. Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.
Walter Lippmann
#51. Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.
David Mitchell
#52. Everyone, no matter what their cultural background, has a right to discover the sacred in nature; to heal and be redeemed spiritually by nature; and to revere the ancestors. We are all haunted and saved by our memories.
Martha Brooks
#53. The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
Philip Carr-Gomm
#54. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#55. If you're Native American and you pray to the wolves, you're a savage. If you're African and you pray to your ancestors, you're a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that's just common sense.
Trevor Noah
#56. But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.
Joshua
#57. Our ancestors always thought of the worst thing that could happen, and that's why we're alive.
Fiona Apple
#58. English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount Jr.
#59. It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
Horace Mann
#60. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation.
Raquel Cepeda
#61. Almost certainly, my ancestors had travelled by sea from Sweden to England in search of prosperity, and the evidence suggests they left Sweden around the ninth or 10th centuries.
Gordon Brown
#62. Honor, justice, and humanity, call upon us to hold, and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children, but it is our duty to leave liberty to them.
John Dickinson
#63. The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.
Elif Shafak
#65. I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.
Donald Johanson
#66. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#67. Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures - they all have families and ancestors, just like people.
Margaret Atwood
#68. Seeds carry life from generation to generation without end. Through the seeds speak the voices of the ancestors. Each time we plant a seed, we become ancestors for the generations to come.
Kenny Ausubel
#69. In the last analysis, we must all, Indian and no-Indian, come together. This earth is our mother, this land is our shared heritage.
Our histories and fates are intertwined, no matter where our ancestors were born and how they interacted with each other.
Kent Nerburn
#70. If we want to set and enforce a limit on immigration, we have to be willing to say no to would-be immigrants who look a lot like our own ancestors, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because admitting them would exceed our legal limit.
Jan C. Ting
#71. He remembers that it was said to him, "Our ancestors were animal forms." But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism.
Rudolf Steiner
#72. By their garbage shall ye know them," Christie yells, like a preacher, a downy preacher. "I swear, by the ridge of tears and by the valour of my ancestors, I say unto you, Morag Gunn, lass, that by their bloody goddamn fucking garbage shall ye christly well know them.
Margaret Laurence
#73. We must strive to become good ancestors.
Ralph Nader
#74. Daddy once told me there's a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn't stop the slave masters from hurting their families. Daddy also said there's nothing more dangerous than when that rage is activated.
Angie Thomas
#75. Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Frank Herbert
#76. Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.
Lynne Tillman
#78. Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health.
Paul Stamets
#79. My Great Ancestors Suffered A Lot.
They Never Smoked Marihuana.
Petra Hermans
September 13, 2016
Petra Hermans
#80. High born she might not be. But assuredly she cared about her ancestors,
E. M. Forster
#81. W are all carrying the imprints of our most ancient ancestors. Not simply in the genetic code, but in the imprints of attention that are passed on.
Frederick Lenz
#82. Who am I to tell a man to live? Who am I to claim the powers of the Ancestors? I moved aside so the shawman could have more room to do his holy work. He's climbed the Scared Mountain and seen the face of the Ancestors. I have no place beside him. -Dashti
Shannon Hale
#83. A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil ... not the cross.
Greg Graffin
#84. As I explore the wilderness of my own body, I see that I am made of blood and bones, sunlight and water, pesticide residues and redwood humus, the fears and dreams of generations of ancestors, particles of exploded stars.
Anne Cushman
#85. There is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
Bill Bryson
#86. I think we're going back to the way things use to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors thought the distinction was necessary.
(pg 370)
G. Willow Wilson
#87. To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.
Frank Delaney
#88. We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.
Peter R. Grant
#90. I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
William Gaddis
#91. Even while Jerusalem was standing and the Jews were at peace with us, the practice of their sacred rites was at variance with the glory of our empire, the dignity of our name, the customs of our ancestors.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#92. Stars blazed above Hollyleaf 's head, reminding her that the spirits of her ancestors were watching over her.
Erin Hunter
#93. Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ...
Joseph Conrad
#94. Why couldn't she listen to him just once? Would it be that much of an insult to her feminist ancestors?
Em Wolf
#95. All to whom want is terrible, upon whatever principle, ought to think themselves obliged to learn the sage maxims of our parsimonious ancestors, and attain the salutary arts of contracting expense; for without economy none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.
Samuel Johnson
#96. We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
Don Marquis
#97. Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood.
DaShanne Stokes
#98. There is no need to upset about the fact that our ancestors were monkeys, because they are capable chaps! Don't be sad about the truth, just understand the truth!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#99. In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis.
Herbert A. Simon
#100. All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State.
Edwin A. Abbott
