Thoughts of Ancestry or Ancestors Quotes in English

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

Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

- Carl Sagan

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

- Helen Keller

When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition can always be found. They forgot where they came from.

- Carle Sandburg

Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.

- F. Sionil Jose

Men can know more than their ancestors did if they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors had already learned.That is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its traditions.

- Walter Lippmann

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

- Edgar Watson Howe

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

- Marian Wright Edelman

When we know about our ancestors, when we sense them as living and as supporting us, then we feel connected to the genetic life-stream, and we draw strength and nourishment from this.

- Philip Carr-Gomm

Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future.

- Gail Lumet Buckley

A man who thinks too much about his ancestors is like a potato-the best part of him is underground

- Henry S.F. Cooper

Ancestors Sayings List

The sharp thorn often produces delicates roses.

- Ovid

Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

- Plato

If your descent is from heroic sires, show in your life a remnant of their fires.

- Nicolas Boileau Quotation

Author Breed is stronger than pasture.

- George Eliot

You live as long as you are remembered.

- Russian proverb

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

- A Quotation From Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.

- German Proverb Sayings of German Orgin

Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.

- Russian proverb sayings of Russian Origin Quotes

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

- Seneca

We were not the victims of ancestor worship. We had the benefits of a fresh start.

- Matthew D. Miller

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

- David Mitchell

It is a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

- Plutarch

The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.

- Eknath Easwaran

Those who forget their past are destined to repeat it.

- Robert A. Heinlein

My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat.

- Will Rogers Quotes

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

- Seneca

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.

- Edmund Burke

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

- C.S. Lewis

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

- Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

Our ancestors have invented, we can at least innovate.

- Amit Kalantri

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

- Voltaire Quotes

I don't have to look up my family tree because I know that I'm the sap.

- Fred Allen

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

- George Bernard Shaw

We are the ancestors of the future and what we do now will have an impact.

- Luisah Teish

There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children - one is roots, and the other, wings.

- Hodding S. Carter

Genealogy Tracing yourself back to people better than you are.

- John Garland Pollard *

Our ancestors who changed the world did so through new ideas which came to them as they acted.

- Raymond Charles Barker

Genealogy.  An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.

- Ambrose Bierce

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

- Pietro Metastasio Download or Share

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

- Ancestors Quotes by Abraham Lincoln Download or Share

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

- Ancestry Quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson Download or Share

The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.

- Sir Thomas Overbore Download or Share

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

- Plutarch Download or Share

Heredity is nothing, but stored environment.

- Luther Burbank Download or Share

Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.

Danish Proverb Sayings of Danish Origin Download or Share

From our ancestors come out names from our virtues our honor.

-Ancestors Proverb Download or Share

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

Fred A. Allen Download or Share

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors.  The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

Edgar Watson Howe

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

Toni Morrison Download or Share

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Download or Share

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

- Joyce Carol Oates Download or Share

Though we have rightly applauded our ancestors for their spiritual achievements, those of us who prevail today will have done no small thing.

- Quotes by Neal A. Maxwell Download or Share

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn ... betrays its ancestor.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world.  In other words, it is determined by his heredity.

- Henry Louis

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

- James Russell Lowell

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

- Samuel Johnson

We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.

- Jimmy Carter

Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

- Van Wyck Brooks

Good breading is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

- Lord Chesterfield

The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the solider a brute and everyone else disagreeable.

- Lord Chesterfield

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent.  You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.

- W. S. Gilbert

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?

- Hitopadesa

Stillness and steadiness o features are signal marks of good breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Ancestors Quotes List

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents.  It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

- W. Winwood Reade

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

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

- Robert Anton Wilson

The ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made.

- Robert Bly

The search for knowledge is in our genes. It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched.

- E. O. Wilson

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.

- Seneca

We rarely know who our ancestors were. Who can even remember the names of their great-grandparents? They have vanished into the dim and distant past.

- Dmitri Volkogonov

Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.

- Carl Sagan

We inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted. Each of us contains within this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise.

- Edward Sellner

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them.  But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

- George Bernard Shaw

We are connected, like it or not, to the ancestors of our biological families, and their templates.

- Robert Moss

In church your grandsire cut his throat;  To do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

- Jonathan Swift

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

- Mark Twain Thoughts

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.

- Sallust Thought

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

- Claude Vorilhon

If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.

- Michael Crichton

Indeed, if our ancestors of millions of years ago hadn't learned how to care for one another and hunt in packs, they'd all have ended up being eaten by leopards.

- Robert Shea

Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one.

- Howard Kenneth Nixon

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

- Alex Haley

Our ancestors, possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice has placed them.

- Thomas Jefferson

We are the ancestors of our grandchildren's children. We look after them, just as our ancestors look after us. We aren't here for ourselves. We are here for each other and for the children of our grandchildren.

- Roy Sesana

We are bound to our ancestors and to those who made us, whether we want to be or not. What matters is what we make of what we are.

- Kate Elliott

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten; Either write things worthy of reading, or do things worthy of writing.

- Benjamin Franklin

Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.

- Annie Lennox