Quotes About Ancestors

How can a man die better, he recited to himself, than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody's ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

Because although Dawkins may feel that our mystery has been solved - and although science has indeed solved part of it - most of us still do not feel solved. We do not live our lives and experience our existence as solved beings. On the contrary we still experience ourselves, as our ancestors did, as tor and contradictory beings, vulnerable to aspects of ourselves and our world that we cannot understand.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

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.

The only way to answer the question "Are things getting better or are they getting worse?" is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, "facts"—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced "truth"—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence.

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.

To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.

But Kievan Rus's glory days were short-lived. Lying on his deathbed in 1054 Yaroslav had pleaded with his offspring to 'love one another' for 'If ye dwell in envy and dissension, quarrelling with one another, then ye will perish yourselves and bring to ruin the land of your ancestors . . .'11

As long as we tell our urban ancestors' stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.

Everything and everyone was so hungry. The monster. The Barrow folk, buying everything up when danger lurked. The City people, clutching at pretty little enchanted things. Substituting magic for people. The shining people's ancestors, when the plague threatened, ignoring the warnings of the wizards, assuring themselves magic would keep them safe as they themselves brought death upon the entire island.

For many centuries people have believed that there is continuity between the individual in utero and the individual in the world; now there is solid evidence that this ancient belief is correct, albeit in a far more complex and nuanced way than our ancestors ever imagined. But science can't tell us everything we need to know about this new perspective; there's always a gap where the hard evidence of the laboratory meets the soft flesh of our bodies.

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

Among my European ancestors were piano builders, goldsmiths, and vintners but, to the best of my knowledge, no professionals of any kind.

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.

I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to go with it. One of my great-great grandfathers was killed by a gang of white Prohibition patrollers.

I'm very proud of the Italian heritage of my great-grandparents, who came here from Italy, and how they helped be a part of the American Dream, and that's something we want to continue to make available to everybody who wants to come here.

I'm one hundred percent Irish, and I'm very proud that I'm Irish American, though I don't know exactly where my ancestors came from. I just know County Cork.

Mach dir nicht die Mühe besser zu sein als deine Zeitgenossen oder deine Vorfahren. Versuch nur besser zu sein als du selbst.

Because men learn only what would be of use to their great-grandparents. The right way to live is something we can teach only the dead.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

I like history because you can't really progress without knowing what comes before you, so I think it's super fascinating.