Quotes About Origins

Pounds are the sons, not of pounds, but of pence.

In war events of importance are the result of trivial causes.

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.

There is no more reason to believe that man descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.

Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato - the only good belonging to him is underground.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

My father was a Gujarati and my mom Turkish.

I grew up in a town in France called Saint-Die, where there were many immigrants - Senegalese, Morrocans, Turks. My parents came from Senegal. My father came first, actually. He was a lumberjack. Yes, a real French lumberjack.

We must, however, note that what are usually called the high religions made their appearance within about twenty-five hundred years - most of them within fifteen hundred years.

I understand people want to hold on to their roots.

If anybody wants to believe they're the descendants of a primate, they're welcome to do it.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

War is life war is the origin of all things.

They are saving books by returning them to their origins—to the tradition of oral storytelling, which gave stories their durability before paper and ink could.

It's so good to have friends from home, don't you think so?" "I haven't lived there for a very long time." "It's your roots that count." "Plants and trees have roots. People have legs. »

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.

I believe L.A. made me, really raised me. I think about that all the time. If I was raised in New York, how would I be? Would my game be different? You know, I think about that a lot, if I was raised somewhere else.

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.