Quotes About Ancestors

Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.

We have a system that is deeply narcissistic - the consumer sort of capitalist culture. It's all about me and now and what do I need that just makes you feel a bit better with all the stress. But in other healthy cultures, they have a real sense of ancestor and a sense of the next seven generations.

The house is made up of the spirits of our ancestors. Did you think they would lie idly by while we were under attack? 'Cuz, yeah, didn't everybody's ancestors rise up and destroy enemies.

The latter, which honors Abraham's willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts … and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

This tottered ensign of my ancestors Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea Whereof we got the name of Mortimer, Will I advance upon these castle-walls. Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!

There may be some part of the world – dead countries, or secure and by-passed ones – where men can cherish the past and think of passing on furniture and china to their heirs. Men can do that perhaps in Sweden or Canada.

ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as foes—we do not know. Nor again do we know why they vanished, although given our species' dismal record as responsible stewards of nature, it's a decent bet that we drove them to extinction.

Neanderthals

the migrating bands in these times preserved hot coals in hardened mooseskin sacks or birchbark containers filled with ash in which the embers pulsated, ready to spark the next campfire.

Aie dans les veines le doux lait de ta mère, et le généreux esprit de ton père ; sois bon, sois fort, sois honnête, sois juste ! Et reçois, dans le baiser de ta grand-mère, la bénédiction de ton grand-père.

Well, I'm a Lovelace. My family quit Shadowhunting due to laziness in the 1700s.

We are the subjects, and so is everything around us, of all manner of subtle and inexplicable influences: and if our ancestors attached too much importance to these ill-understood arcana of the night-side of nature, we have attached too little.

Ancestors. Ghosts. Ghosts we're still married to even though we can't see so much as their shadows on the ground. We're no better than pieces on squares, in a game the past plays with the future.

Writing is a family trade like anything else: you are more entitled to the profession if your ancestors have already set up shop.

What he says may be true for English, but why should I want to go into this God's house if only English are there? If God wanted us in this house than he would have sent our ancestors such a book.

For a girl raised on the rim of a wilderness, it was strange to be in a place where every inch of ground had been settled for hundreds upon hundreds of years. I felt the press of people, and the press of ghosts—great hordes of those who had lived and walked before me.

For some crime committed by my ancestors in the dark and forgotten days, I came into the world already tarred and feathered. With shyness. It hurts terribly -- every bit as much as hot tar choking every pore -- and I wish I could be rid of it. But it hurts a lot less than having someone try and peel the shyness off. That's like being flayed alive.

Glorious ancestors, is there still hope for us? Are we not completely dead? Can you see the future? I'm exhausted, nothing shields me from suffering, the way ahead is dark, and all I see makes hope phantasmagorical.

My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents, which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

With the sole aim of liberating themselves from the servitude of religion, which alone could preserve them in society, and, lacking any other restraint, they turned their backs upon the true God of their fathers, Adam and Noah, and descended into a bestial liberty in which, dispersed throughout the great forest of the earth, they lost their language and weakened every social custom.

Bacon, like Vico, held that the ancients were not classic models for the moderns, but their primitive ancestors – an idea that lies at the core of the New Science.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes -- our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.