#Ancestry Quotes

“A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.”

“Our ancestors ... were laborers, not lawyers.”

“I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?”

“A spot whereon the founders lived and diedSeemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,Or gardens rich in memory glorifiedMarriages, alliances, and families,And every bride's ambition satisfied.”

“We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”

“Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

“Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

“You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs. They sought for true success, and therefore they did not seek ease. They knew that success comes only to those who lead the life of endeavor”

“Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers”

“In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.”

“Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.”

“I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and what your hopes and dreams were.”

“Out of the huts of history's shame I rise Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.”

“I'm a descendant of someone bought and sold, and brought in 1619 in what was to become the United States.”

“We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.”

“All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.”

“We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men... We are who we are because they were who they were. It's wise to know where you come from, who called your name.”

“Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.”

“X is not my real name. But if you study history, you'll find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.”

“My father didn't know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather who got it from the slavemaster.”

“I never really knew about my ancestors until this year, when I learned that the name Cobain was Irish. My parents had never bothered to find that stuff out.”

“My grandma always said, "Where there's a will, there's a way." I think it's just naturally in our DNA to be able to survive. We was always taught that: to survive. When you talking about slavery, it's to survive.”

“My mother... would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

“The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.”

“I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way .”

“No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.”

“Follow in the footsteps of your fathers' virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers' will climbs with you?”

“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”

“Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land.”

“Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.”

“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.”