Quotes about Ancestors

...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world.

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors.  All of them are alive in this moment.  Each is present in your body.  You are the continuation of each of these people.

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

Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind.  I carve out rough answers as best I can.  I have even drawn them on the walls.  It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors' wisdom.

In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, - seven or eight ancestors at least, and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is.

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.

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 smiling child,
Named for a noble ancestor.
Great hunter or warrior
You will be one day,
Which will give your papa pride.
But always I will remember you thus.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

While our ancestors knew of only one true way, we have a cornucopia of spiritual and psychological and physical possibilities.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.  After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time.  Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them.  Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Over the course of the millennia, all these ancestors in your tree, generation upon generation, have come down to this moment in time-to give birth to you. There has never been, nor will ever be, another like you. You have been given a tremendous responsibility. You carry the hopes and dreams of all those who have gone before. Hopes and dreams for a better world. What will you do with your time on this Earth? How will you contribute to the ongoing story of humankind?

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.