quotations about ancestry & ancestors
I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
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
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
It is indeed a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
PLUTARCH
On the Training of Children
People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
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
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
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
We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.
TANYA TAGAQ
Split Tooth
Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.
PLATO
Theaetetus
He's a chip o' the old block.
WILLIAM ROWLEY
A Match at Midnight
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
Forge your path. Crack your ancestors wide open. By any means necessary, unearth your roots.
GABBY RIVERA
America #7
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
Who, fond of pedigree, derive
From the most noted whore alive.
MATTHEW GREEN
The Spleen
It is not out of the flesh that is bred in the bone.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.
EMILY DICKINSON
Poems
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