ANCESTRY

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as an insignificant life, only the insignificance of mind that refuses to grasp the implications.
Laurence Overmire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants.
Danish Proverbs

Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.
German Proverbs

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

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

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

High birth is an accident, not a virtue.
Pietro Metastasio

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

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is anyone simply by birth to be applauded or punished?
Hitopadesa

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man is his own best ancestor.
Tiberius