#ancestors

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

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

All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess) ↗

— Blanche Bachelar

#generation #love #paris #psychology #romance

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

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#again #ancestors #ancestry #black #forced

Just because I don't believe in YOUR God doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I just choose not to be bound by the limits of your imagination or those of your ancestors. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#god #imagination #limits #religion #experience

It is surprising to me that one of the great crimes of history has gone unnoticed; the abduction of god by religions. This slight-of-hand has been the cause of countless blood-shed and has been found at the root of innumerable acts of evil. The argument continues today, as to which religion the true god belongs, when what would be most healing and empowering is to free god from the shackles of religious limitation and judgment. It is by emancipating god from the ignorance of our ancestors that we become empowered to explore and express our own relationship with what god may or may not be. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#empowered #god #history #relationship #religion

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

To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also. ↗

— Robert T. Bakker

#also #ancestors #blooded #dinosaurs #mammal

Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America. ↗

— Herman Cain

#africa #america #ancestors #back #black