Quotes About Origins

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.

You and I are cobbled out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. We could have a carbon cell in one of our elbows that was once part of a trilobite's tail. Or a cell from Atilla the Hun's moustache in our eye. Or an ancient lotus petal in our tonsils.

It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.

The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren't rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are

My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them.

Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past - connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.

Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past—connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected.

Each of us is born with a history already in place

So does that mean your real parents didn't want you?

the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new

ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN "JONY" IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs's partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH "JOHN" JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

In the Nile Valley, civilization resulted from man's adaptation to that particular milieu. As declared by the Ancients and by the Egyptians themselves, it originated in Nubia. This is confirmed by our knowledge that the basic elements of Egyptian civilization are neither in Lower Egypt, nor in Asia, nor in Europe, but in Nubia and the heart of Africa; moreover, that is where we find the animals and plants represented in hieroglyphic writing....

Our parents are the primal source. We make our own lives, but our origin stories are theirs. They go back with us to the beginning of time.

Nancy According to astronomers, every atom in my body was forged in a star. I am made, they insist, of stardust. I am stardust braided into strands and streamers of information, proteins and DNA, double helixes of stardust. In every cell of my body there is a thread of stardust as long as my arm.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.

Every institution is affected by the culture in which it lives and especially the culture in which it was born. That includes my church and denomination as well as yours.

The word strategy only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century. Its origins predated Napoleon and reflected the Enlightenment's growing confidence in empirical science and the application of reason.

every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.