Ancestry Quotes - Page 2

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

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Memories, Tree, Ancestor

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2016). “Memories and Portraits: Stevenson's Vol. 21”, p.36, VM eBooks

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• The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

  Ovid

  Flower, Rose, Produce

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• What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood, of all the Howards.

  Alexander Pope

  Blood, Coward, Slave

  Alexander Pope, Daniel Clark (1824). “An Essay on Man: In Four Epistles, to H. St. John, Lord Bolingbroke”, p.58

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• By looking at the details of the DNA, it is possible to chart the flow of your ancestry from your ultimate grandmother to more modern times.

  Bryan Sykes

  Grandmother, Dna, Details

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• Sire, I am my own Rudolph of Hapsburg.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Rudolph, My Own

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations". Book by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, 1922.

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• Hereditary honors are a noble and a splendid treasure to descendants.

  Plato

  Plato, Honor, Noble

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• 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.

  Spencer Wells

  Answers, Patterns, Biology

  "Finding the roots of modern humans" by Marsha Walton, www.cnn.com. April 14, 2005.

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

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Life, Fire, Heroic

  "Satires (Satire 5)". Book by Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, 1716.

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• Born in a cellar, and living in a garret.

  Samuel Foote

  Life, Born, Cellars

  'The Author' (1757) act 2

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

  Saadi

  Pride, Virtue, Thyself

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• Being well satisfied that, for a man who thinks himself to be somebody, there is nothing more disgraceful than to hold himself up as honored, not on his own account, but for the sake of his forefathers. Yet hereditary honors are a noble and splendid treasure to descendants.

  Plato

  Men, Thinking, Honor

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• There are many kinds of conceit, but the chief one is to let people know what a very ancient and gifted family one descends from.

  Benvenuto Cellini

  People, Kind, Ancient

  Benvenuto Cellini (1956). “The Autobiography”

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• 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.

  John Frederick Boyes

  Two, Ciphers, Talent

  John Frederick Boyes (1859). “Life and Books: Or, Records of Thought and Reading”, p.58

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• What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring?

  Philip Sidney

  Men, Birth, Stains

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.3

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• Though you be sprung in direct line from Hercules, if you show a lowborn meanness, that long succession of ancestors whom you disgrace are so many witnesses against you; and this grand display of their tarnished glory but serves to make your ignominy more evident.

  Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

  Long, Lines, Glory

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• He that boasts of his ancestors confesses that he has no virtue of his own. No person ever lived for our honor; nor ought that to be reputed ours, which was long before we had a being; for what advantage can it be to a blind man to know that his parents had good eyes? Does he see one whit the better?

  Pierre Charron

  Eye, Men, Long

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• 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.

  Joseph Addison

  Honor, Titles, Merit

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1819). “The Spectator”, p.21

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• Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Helping Others, Roots, People

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

  Clarence Day

  Eggs, Birth, Source

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• Those who have nothing else to recommend them to the respect of others but only their blood, cry it up at a great rate, and have their mouth perpetually full of it. They swell and vapor, and you are sure to hear of their families and relations every third word.

  Pierre Charron

  Blood, Vapor, Mouths

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• 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.

  Hosea Ballou

  Book, Names, Descent

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• We are very fond of some families because they can be traced beyond the Conquest, whereas indeed the farther back, the worse, as being the nearer allied to a race of robbers and thieves.

  Daniel Defoe

  Race, Thieves, Conquest

  Daniel Defoe (1843). “The works of Daniel De Foe [ed.] by W. Hazlitt”

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• Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.

  James Russell Lowell

  Spring, Pride, Weakness

  James Russell Lowell (2016). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell (Illustrated)”, p.1818, Delphi Classics

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

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Hurt, People, Comfort

  Maxine Hong Kingston (2014). “The Woman Warrior: Picador Classic”, p.17, Pan Macmillan

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• 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.

  James Gates Percival

  Father, Mean, Fool

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