Quotes About Origins

In talking of evolution, it is common to have in mind a tree.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio offers insight into the origins of this guilt. Damasio describes two levels of experiencing pain. The first is a physical response to a painful stimulus. The second, a far more complex reaction, is an emotion associated with pain. This is an internal representation of the physical.

In this dismissal of origins we see the new pragmatism.

If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

Carl Sagan has said, "To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.") As

We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.

He did not possess literary talents himself but in terms of his reading alone, he was an intellectual, despite being the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman.

The nineteenth-century mathematician Leopold Kronecker said, "God made the integers; all the rest is the work of man.

You are hatching from the past.

In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.

The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today—Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia—even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.

Above our heads, is where our roots are found.

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

The truth is that the idea of home and the idea of our mother and father were inseparable.

You are what you are because your parents made love at that exact moment, and if they made love one second after you would be different.

Love of power more frequently originates in vanity than pride (two qualities, by the way, which are often confounded) and is, consequently, yet more peculiarly the sin of little than of great minds.

For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesnt begin at all.

Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.

The best way to be beautiful is to choose your parents well.

Women been gittin' pregnant ever since Eve ate that apple.

My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.