Quotes About Origins

Mankind is one thing; a man's self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts.

If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen.

For nothing ever ends, really; stories lead to other stories, journeys across a thousand miles of ocean lead to journeys across a continent, and the meanings and interpretations of these stories are legion. 'Origins' are simply where we choose to pick up the story, dictating (and dictated by) what kind of story it is we wish to tell. 'Outcomes' are where we wearily draw to a close.

thus Jacob's name, which means "the deceiver

Genesis is not metaphysically neutral—it mandates an affirmation of teleology (purpose), even as it leaves open the descriptive mechanism for material origins.

As we begin our study of Genesis 1 then, we must be aware of the danger that lurks when we impose our own cultural ideas on the text without thinking. The Bible's message must not be subjected to cultural imperialism. Its message transcends the culture in which it originated, but the form in which the message was imbedded was fully permeated by the ancient culture. This was God's design and we ignore it at our peril.

On the basis of Adam's statement, combined with these data on usage, we would have to conclude that God took one of Adam's sides—likely meaning he cut Adam in half and from one side built the woman.

The golfing champion went on to state that as a child he'd invented the term, "Cablinasian" to describe his parents multi-ethnicity and nationality—a mix of half Asian (Chinese and Thai), one-quarter African American, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth Dutch.

The Wars of the Roses weren't called that. Sir Walter Scott invented the name four centuries after the conflict.

The phrase "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" is often said to refer to a metallic grid with circular holes in it, set under a pyramid of cannonballs on a ship's deck to keep it stable. When this "brass monkey" got cold enough, the metal contracted and the cannonballs all popped out. In fact, the phrase means exactly what it says; the fake nautical euphemism is an attempt to make its rude humor more acceptable.

Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.

Another saying, "The egg didn't like its shell," was used for people who tried to distance themselves from where they came from, or who disrespected their parents.

where a person comes from means far less than what she makes of herself.

I was raised in a clade. There is no real me.

My people have a saying that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago. The species does not yet have a name—nothing

all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

No generation is ever spontaneous. We are none of us our own kind.

For instance, it is a scientific fact that she shares his genes. We live in his house, among his possessions. And in every way his the one who brought her to me, which is one of reasons I love her-though much to my misanthropic amazement, not the only reason. He was my one, true husband and love, and he would have loved her best....

it was at Pompeii, nonetheless, that archaeology was born. It was to come of age in Egypt. Once