Top 106 Ancestor Quotes & Sayings

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

Religion and science have a common ancestor - ignorance.

By comparing the human and chimp genomes, we can see the process of evolution clearly in the changes (in DNA) since we diverged from our common ancestor.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

I love many places to which I have no connection, but identifying an ancestor, or someone I think is an ancestor, has taken me to places I'd never have gone to otherwise.

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.

I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.

The impossibility of a sequel ever recapturing everything - or anything - about its ancestor never stopped legions of writers from trying, or hordes of readers and publishers from demanding more of what they previously enjoyed.

The common ancient ancestor of mulluses and chordates could not possibly have possessed a camera eye, so quite clearly they have evolved independently. The solution has been arrived at by completely different routes.

People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further-a reverse ancestor worship.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after they're dead.

And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after theyre dead.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.

Honor among thieves is the ancestor of all honor.

I just want to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, so that when I'm long gone my great-great-grandchildren can walk up to it and say, "That's my ancestor." That will be my legacy.

The ancestor of every action is a thought. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

A fossil is so powerful. It's moving. This is my ancestor. The naturalist is moved by the fossil... not the cross.

Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?

Every action has an ancestor of a thought.

A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

The truth is that we all are one, that all of us together create god, that god is not man's ancestor, but his descendant.

I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!

We were not the victims of ancestor worship. We had the benefits of a fresh start.

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. I think it's fascinating.

Every man serves a useful purpose: a miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.

We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

The ancestor of every action is thought; when we understand that we begin to comprehend that our world is governed by thought and that everything without had its counterpart originally within the mind.

When we look at things as simple as food, it's not about just nourishment and sustaining our life, it is really the seed of our ancestor.

Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his sons.

To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.

Looking, acting, and ultimately being Prep is not restricted to an elite minority lucky enough to attend prestigious private schools, just because an ancestor or two happened to arrive here on the Mayflower. You don't even have to be a registered Republican.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian-an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine. Your people made it tropical for them. . . . The first slave brought into New England out of Africa was an ancestor of mine-for I am a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.

In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.

The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First.

Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.

I'm enormously proud of being the ancestor of a convict. That's mad, isn't it, but I really am.

But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.

A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts

If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA.

Building the future holds more attraction than ancestor worship, whichever ancestor we're talking about.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type, most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

I regard Abraham as my ancestor. Some of the greatest inspiration I have got has come from what we call the Old Testament prophets and what Jews would say "our prophets."