Grandparents and Ancestors

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

Deep in the cavern of the infant’s breast / The father’s nature lurks, and lives anew.

We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; / Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.

I played with my grandfather a lot when I was a kid. He was dead, but my parents had him cremated and put his ashes in an Etch-a-Sketch.

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,— / Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; / Another race the following spring supplies: / They fall successive, and successive rise.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

With him for a sire and her for a dam, / What should I be but just what I am?

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

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children—and what an inhuman world, without the aged.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

In a brief space the generations of living beings are changed and like runners pass on the torches of life.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

What a father says to his children is not heard by the world; but it will be heard by posterity.

Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.

A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year- old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

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