Quotes about Ancestry

In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues, their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.

The archetypal idea of "home" points in two directions at once. It points backward toward an original hint and taste for union, starting in the body of our mother.

Wasn't forgetfulness a gift of the gods to the ancient world? Without it. Life would be intolerable, wouldn't it? Yes, but the Jews live by other rules. For a Jew, nothing is more important than memory. He is bound to his origins by memory. It is memory that connects him to Abraham, Moses and Rabbi Akiva.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

Even the poorest in Israel are looked upon as freemen who have lost their possessions, for they are the sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Just like our story, the original Christmas tales were stories of searching, not so much for the lost, as for the familiar. Mary and Joseph sought in Bethlehem- the home of their familial ancestry- a place to start their own family; the three kings from the East journeyed beneath the sentinel star to find the King of Kings; and the shepherds sought a child in a place most familiar to them: a manger.

These are the clans of the Levites listed according to their fathers. (1 CHRONICLES 6:19B)

Jesus is said to be a priest in the order of Melchizedek, a priest of God Most High who is a priest not on the basis of a regulation as to his ancestry but on the basis of the power of an indestructible life.

Yes I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown land mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.

REST.—If a man should be able to assent to this doctrine as he ought, that we are all sprung from God in an especial manner, and that God is the father both of men and of gods, I suppose that he would never have any ignoble or mean thoughts about himself. But if Cæsar (the emperor) should adopt you, no one could endure your arrogance; and if you know that you are the son of Zeus, will you not be elated?

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.