Quotes About Inheritance

to think that this was all my own; that I was king and lord of all this country indefensibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance as completely as any lord of a manor in England.

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But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It's not about value; it's about knowledge.

non-twin children who are adopted into different families resemble their biological siblings in personality, even though they may rarely or never have met them, and they have no greater resemblance in personality to their adoptive siblings, who they grew up with, than they do to randomly chosen strangers. The correlation is essentially zero.

Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

My father gave me early indications that he would live forever. One

I have a large watch collection, and classic watches are especially important to me. I had a silver Rolex, and I actually gave it to my little brother. He wears it every day. He's an actor, so whenever he goes to an audition, he can look down, see it, and it gives him confidence. It was a great thing to pass on.

Like father, like daughter. I'm not surprised.

Like mother, like daughter.

I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.

We inherit nothing truly, but what our actions make us worthy of.

If you want to stay young-looking, pick your parents very carefully.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

Multiply your age times your realized pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

This Epistle, is therefore a legacy to the Christians of all ages.

The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

And yet a knowledge is here that tenses the throat as for song: the inheritance of the ones, alive or once alive, who stand behind the ones I have imagined, who took into their minds the troubles of this place, blights of love and race, but saw a good fate here and willingly paid its cost, kept it the best they could, thought of its good, and mourned the good they lost. (From the ending of Where in Clearing, p179)

Grandpa's farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa's father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn't have it at all.

As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;

I am trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was fated to be the continuing crisis of my life, the crisis of racial awareness--the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, then a man always limited by the inheritance of racism, condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist, to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak.