Quotes about ancestry

I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap.

— Fred A. Allen

Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Nicholas Boileau

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

— Van Wyck Brooks

Heredity is nothing, but stored environment.

— Luther Burbank

The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.

— Lord Chesterfield

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

— Lord Chesterfield

Breed is stronger than pasture.

— George Eliot

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— W. S. Gilbert

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?

— Hitopadesa

Stillness and steadiness of features are signal marks of good breeding. Vulgar persons can't sit still, or at least must always work their limbs and features.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

— Edgar Watson Howe

I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

— Abraham Lincoln

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.

— Henry Louis

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

— James Russell Lowell

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.

— Pietro Metastasio

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The person who has nothing to brag about but their ancestors is like a potato; the best part of them is underground.

— Sir Thomas Overbore

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

— Ovid

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

— Plato

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

— Plutarch

From our ancestors come our names from our virtues our honor.

— Proverb

Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.

— Danish Proverb

Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.

— German Proverb

Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son.

— Russian Proverb

There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.

— W. Winwood Reade

My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they were there to meet the boat.

— Will Rogers

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

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

— Seneca

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

— Jonathan Swift

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

— Mark Twain

The kind of ancestors we have had is not as important as the kind of descendants our ancestors have.

— Source Unknown

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

— Voltaire