Quotes About Ancestors

When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.

An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb

Hanya kisahlah... yang bisa menghindarkan keturunan kita dari membuat kesalahan besar seperti pengemis-pengemis buta yang menabrak duri-duri pagar kaktus. (Anthills of The Savannah)

A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

I think a lot of Japanese morals are built around what the dead would think of us.

I went to school with a lot of kids whose fathers and mothers were part of the El Paso black history.

Regardless of approach, the past holds something valuable for all of us. It is literally the root of who we are, physically through our actual ancestors and culturally in establishing the foundations for our current beliefs and practices in religious, social, domestic, and political arenas. The same ancients that we study were themselves drawn to their own pasts, often asking questions similar to the ones we pose today about our past.

Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.

The dead become more powerful as time goes by, you see, boy. What was just an unquiet ghost to your grandfather could be a full-fledged loa to your grandchildren. And I've learned to bend 'em, train 'em in certain directions like you would a vine. Farmer plant a seed in the ground and one day have a tree—I put a ghost in a bottle under running water and one day I have a loa.

February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. —Marcus Tullius Cicero

We're not migrating people,' she said. 'We live in our old houses, and eat on our old dishes and use our old silverware everyday. We're close to the past and comfortable with it. We've surrounded our lives with the pictures of all our relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things personality beyond just the material they're made of.

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.

its current form. Yet, all is not lost. The experience of being fully American has also motivated large segments of millennials to embrace religious practices that their recent ancestors rejected out of fear, thinking that such practices would prevent them from becoming fully American.

We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we've never had before. This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.

My mom sang in high school choir and so did my father.

Everyone had a fudoki, Small Cat knew now. Everyone had their own stories, and the stories of their families and ancestors. There were adventures and love stories, or tricks and jokes and funny things that had happened or disasters. Everyone wanted to tell the stories, and to know where they fit in their own fudokis. She was not that different.

It is re-enactment of the ritual feast, in which the eating of an animal's flesh, or a piece of cake shaped like a breast, signifies the coming together of human and divine, individual with collective, tribal ancestor with member of the tribe, human community with nature, or a woman with her own body and feelings.

bones. In the fear that the bones of the mois and distinguished chiefs might fall into the hands of their enemies and be used for fish-hooks, arrow-points for shooting mice, and other debasing purposes, they were usually destroyed or hidden.

He had told her the story of his brave ancestors in the army, but why didn't he ever speak of his family here and now?

It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

En nuestra región llovía todos los años, abundante, ruidosa, exageradamente, y el clima era siempre para nosotros benignidad y opulencia. Éramos pueblos de lluvia, acostumbrados a las inundaciones y los excesos de agua. Nuestros ancestros habían perdido las escamas sin abandonar el alma de peces.