Best 138 quotes in «ancestors quotes» category

The time is come," he spoke quietly. "Now, when lesser folk would wither, thou must be true to the blood of thine ancestors. Much greatness is bred in thee; accept now this terrible mantle and take a step nearer thy destiny.

The traditions of . . . bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances with contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes - when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone.

…the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?

The wisdom of our ancestors is immortal.

The Wishing Bones A thousand grandmothers ago Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth, a generation of my ancestors strained from the mud of a drowned planet. But I’m more interested in my earliest grandmothers, their gills and wetness, before they crawled from that blue expanse and learned to carry the sea within them, in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes. The buoyancy of ocean has never left us. It hides in skin’s complex reservoir where we're selectively permeable and our bodies exchange the smallest life. If we had no need to distinguish ourselves from others we’d be missing the skin that defines lovers and enemies and opens itself to both.

They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succour. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.

This little girl will be fearless. She’ll do whatever she wants. She won’t feel as scared as me.” A quiet mantra, she repeated it daily.

This energy feels like a pull from the ancestors, helping me to find my own way, to transcend my own fears.

Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents!

To me, the word wisdom means ancient knowledge. It’s the kind of knowledge you not only see but feel when you look into the eyes of an elephant or stop for a moment to marvel at the deep wrinkles on its skin, both of which I believe contain the truths learned from each intentional step their feet and those of their ancestors have placed upon the earth.

To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves...We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.

Turn that worthless lawn into a beautiful garden of food whose seeds are stories sown, whose foods are living origins. Grow a garden on the flat roof of your apartment building, raise bees on the roof of your garage, grow onions in the iris bed, plant fruit and nut trees that bear, don't plant 'ornamentals', and for God's sake don't complain about the ripe fruit staining your carpet and your driveway; rip out the carpet, trade food to someone who raises sheep for wool, learn to weave carpets that can be washed, tear out your driveway, plant the nine kinds of sacred berries of your ancestors, raise chickens and feed them from your garden, use your fruit in the grandest of ways, grow grapevines, make dolmas, wine, invite your fascist neighbors over to feast, get to know their ancestral grief that made them prefer a narrow mind, start gardening together, turn both your griefs into food; instead of converting them, convert their garage into a wine, root, honey, and cheese cellar--who knows, peace might break out, but if not you still have all that beautiful food to feed the rest and the sense of humor the Holy gave you to know you're not worthless because you can feed both the people and the Holy with your two little able fists.

To the loyal and to the blood-lovers, in the good families and in the fiery dynasties, life is family and family is life. It is the same people who give advice and their vices to live well who turn out to be the ones who give resource and reason to live long.

We are free falling backward through time, reincarnating ourselves from our past, reflecting the chaotic energy of the present.

We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections.

We are our ancestors. The spiritual umbilicus is apparent to all. The dead look upon us with the pure love of a mother’s gaze. But the dead love is even more because of our flawed flesh and eternal confusion. The removal from form allows for total and complete unconditional love. We carry our dead with us like helium balloons. There is no breaking the umbilicus.

We are just stars in our family's constellation

We are the subjects, and so is everything around us, of all manner of subtle and inexplicable influences: and if our ancestors attached too much importance to these ill-understood arcana of the night-side of nature, we have attached too little.

We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.

We do not brag about ancestors that were not great

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.

We ought to know the history of our ancient ancestors.

We don't live like our ancestors did, so why should we base our diet and ethics on how they may or may not have lived? Let's evolve into a more peaceful, compassionate species and respect all life forms.

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

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.

We’re all immortal, as long as our stories are told.

What you think is advanced would embarrass any of the masters of the old. Their capabilities rastly surpassed ours. We are a thousand years behind what they achieved.

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.

Whenever I feel sad or a little fragile, I invoke their presence (the ancestors) for support, and they never fail to be there.

When we listen to those stories, not only are we hearing tales of days gone by, we are also hearing the voices of all of those who lived before us. Those ancestors are not gone from our lives. They live in the stories, and they linger in our environments. They come to us in dreams and during ceremonies. They whisper to us in quiet moments and bring us comfort. One of my favorite stories is about a friend's experience with the ancestors. She was doing repatriation work, which involves caring for the remains of an ancestor until they can be properly buried with their people. In this instance, the ancestor that she was caring for had been part of a gruesome display in a museum. During her time with him, she remained in prayer when he came to her and gave her a message. First, he thanked her for bringing him back home. Then, he told her, "we dreamed you into the future." Our ancestors lived for us; they died for us; and they dreamed for us. Through their collective imaginings, we were all brought into being. What an incredible honor it is for us to carry their life forward through our own.

When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted.

Where are the blossoms of those summers!-fallen, one by one: so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of the spirits.

You are the strongest male I have ever known, Dancer. No one is more worthy of your noble lineage. You honor your family and your ancestors. And you are a treasure for Andaria. I know the first Dancer of the Warring Blood Clan of Hauk smiles whenever he looks down and sees the strength and beauty of his namesake.

You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.

Your ancestors have brought you to this stage of life. Honor your ancestors.

Your existence is defiance: as those around you perish, you gather those passed souls and rise with them, as if your voice and leadership is made stronger by a long line of ancestors who stand tall, in spirit, with you. And I think that's what I loved most about your description of your physical self: 'I would not change anything about me. I represent my ancestors.

Your past is your ancestors and your life history. The wise ones do not ignore or forget that. It teaches and leads one to the vision for new ways.