#ancestor

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. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#ancestors #assimilation #family #family-line #heritage

Our ancestors always thought of the worst thing that could happen, and that's why we're alive. ↗

— Fiona Apple

#always #ancestors #could #happen #our

Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone. ↗

— John Ciardi

#ancestors #gone #left #money #over

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton. ↗

— Donald Johanson

#arm #bone #brought #find #get

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits. ↗

— Sallust

#concealment #descendants #distinguished #either #forbid

The people who have recently come to this country to work and better their lives should be given the same opportunities that our parents, grandparents, and ancestors were given. ↗

— Jose Serrano

#better #come #country #given #grandparents

I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile. ↗

— John Shelby Spong

#against #ancestors #because #becomes #boots

Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for. ↗

— Henry Wiencek

#life #search #time #family

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243) ↗

— Norman Doidge

#death #ghosts #grief #healing-the-past #loss

With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench. ↗

— Jim Walsh

#american way #ancestors #arms #came #died