#ancestors

I've always thought you have to live life looking forwards, not backwards. I've had no interest at all in who my ancestors are. ↗

— Jeremy Paxman

#ancestors #backwards #forwards #had #i

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#ancestors #exhilaration #freedom #hands #into

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

Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves. ↗

— Phyllis George

#belonging #connect #crafts #create #express

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors. ↗

— Frank Herbert

#escape #our #pay #violence

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

— Plutarch

#belongs #desirable #glory #indeed #our

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