Best 137 quotes in «ancestry quotes» category

Few sons attain the praise Of their great sires and most their sires disgrace.

For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

Great families of yesterday we show, And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deed of another.

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

If your descent is from heroic sires, Show in your life a remnant of their fires.

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate.

I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.

I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule.

I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I get anxious. That lovely Jewish guilt that comes with ancestry.

It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, "O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.

It is indeed a desirable thing to be well-descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

It is indeed a striking proof of the essential soundness of the tradition that with which all these thousands of copies, tracing their ancestry back to so many different parts of the earth and to conditions of such diverse kinds, the variations of text are so entirely questions of detail, not of essential substance.

It is the highest of earthly honors to be descended from the great and good. They alone cry out against a noble ancestry who have none of their own.

It is with antiquity as with ancestry, nations are proud of the one, and individuals of the other; but if they are nothing in themselves, that which is their pride ought to be their humiliation.

I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.

My forefathers didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea

No one is better born than another, unless they are born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition.

My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

Nobility of birth is like a cipher; it has no power in itself, like wealth or talent; but, it tells with all the power of a cipher when added to either of the other two.

No man is nobler born than another, unless he is born with better abilities and a more amiable disposition. They who make such a parade with their family pictures and pedigrees, are, properly speaking, rather to be called noted or notorious than noble persons. I thought it right to say this much, in order to repel the insolence of men who depend entirely upon chance and accidental circumstances for distinction, and not at all on public services and personal merit.

Pride thyself on what virtue thou hast, and not on thy parentage.

Pedigrees seldom improve by age; the grandson is too often a weak infringement on the grandsire's parent.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Pedigree and ancestry and what we ourselves have not achieved, I scarcely recognize as our own.

People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

So what we can answer [as geneticists] is questions about biology, about biological ancestry. But to make any sense of that historically we have to contextualize it - the archaeology, the linguistic pattern, even the climatology.

Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolite.

The egg it is the source of all To everyone's ancestral hall.

Stillness of person and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding.

The behavior of an individual is determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

The origin of all mankind was the same; it is only a clear and good conscience that makes a man noble, for that is derived from heaven itself.

The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity. [Lat., Majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala in occulto patitur.]

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato. The best part is underground.

The original mixed ancestry of the Jews and their subsequent history of intermixture with every people among whom they have lived and continue to live.

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible.

There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.