Quotes About Origins

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.

My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.

Ah! It is precisely in this that we reveal our base material origins. Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.

Woman was created for our destruction, and it is from her we inherit all our miseries.

It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.

This formation of man from soft clay, and of woman from a hard bone, also illustrated why man was so much more easily reconcilable than woman.

THIS IS THE ACCOUNT of when all is still silent and placid. All is silent and calm. Hushed and empty is the womb of the sky. THESE, then, are the first words, the first speech. There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, or forest. All alone the sky exists. The face of the earth has not yet appeared.

I was born to poor because of honest parents.

Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance. Seven days they would sit in the silence of thought or wonder; -- and would open their mouths -- to winged sentences.

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.

My family life mirrors why I am the person I am.

Every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered by waters which did not sustain any life.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

My own sense of family, where I came from and what I made for myself is an important part of my life.

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.

If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual.

But wait - where did the gods come from 100,000 years ago? Early Homo Sapiens certainly had conversations with other early Homo Sapiens regarding what they thought of one another, and what they thought about a third early Homo Sapiens who had insulted them, and why they were no longer on speaking terms with the other person, ad finitum, just as happens today. But you cannot have such conversations about the gods or with the gods unless you have gods.

There was no religion in my life growing up. Did God invent us or did we invent God?

In the effort to deny from whence we came," Baldwin declared, "we've had to make up a series of myths about it.

Our parents are the root of our body.

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things have their beginnings but the seed never explains the flower.