Quotes About Origins

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

We weren't raised Muslim - we were born Muslim. I didn't go to a Muslim school, but it was just the theme song. It was ambient.

she wanted to figure out where her problems had come from, she might take a closer look at her family.

I read once that we're all just dead stars looking back up to the sky, because everything we're made of, even the hemoglobin in our blood, comes from the moment before a star dies.

I read once that we're all just dead stars looking back up at the sky, because everything we're made of, even the haemoglobin in our blood, comes from the moment before a star dies.

Alternatively, it may be that a form of early Indo-European arrived with the first farmers

perhaps even thousands, before our imagined Aegean dawn in the year 1500 BCE.

Si examinamos a la cultura como juego y al juego como una extensión de funciones neuronales, como he propuesto, podemos entender mejor cómo, desde sus orígenes, la cultura es una extraña prótesis que compelta y suple actividades que el cerebro no puede desempeñar más que con la ayuda de estas redes simbólicas externas de reemplazo.

Part of the process of getting out, of uprooting, is to shed origins. In Rome, as elsewhere in my family, the past was less a source of fascination than a thing to be overcome.

Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet's nature.

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

Proto Indo European!

The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

Genesis not only tells us about the origins of the universe and humankind, it also informs us of the origins of human sin, suffering, and death. God's work of redemption, as recorded throughout the rest of Scripture, would make little sense if we did not first understand these foundational truths in the book of Genesis.

those whom he termed 'primordial characters' of humanity.

Our history marks us. Sometimes I think our state's beginning years haunt everything: the city's attempts to graft progressive ideas onto its racist origins, the fact that we can't undo history but are forced to either confront or repeat it.

When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation.

Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that?

Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.

Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.