Famous Ancestry Ancestors Quotations

"The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses."

by Ovid

"Breed is stronger than pasture."

by George Eliot

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

by Ancestry, Ancestors

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

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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

by George Bernard Shaw

"Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others."

by Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

by Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

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

by Will Rogers

"Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses."

by Proverb

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

by Plutarch

"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."

by Jonathan Swift

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

by Nicholas Boileau

"I don't have to look up my family tree, because I know that I'm the sap."

by Fred A. Allen

"Heredity is nothing, but stored environment."

by Luther Burbank

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

by Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

"Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others."

by Lord Chesterfield

"Genealogy. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own."

by Ambrose Bierce

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

by Proverb

"Clever father, clever daughter; clever mother, clever son."

by Proverb

"Unworthy offspring brag the most about their worthy descendants."

by Danish proverb

"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."

by W. Winwood Reade

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

by Lord Chesterfield

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

by Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."

by Van Wyck Brooks