Ancestry in Quotes

When you are alive perhaps you can afford to make an analogy of being the essence of life itself, the vital fluids of a body or the sap of a tree. Fred Allan preferred to think of himself as such when also thinking of how we look back to our ancestry to find our roots. He didn’t want anything to do with looking back and he was not the only one.

George Elliot remarked that breed is stronger than pasture probably meaning that the person’s heritage or lineage is more important than his surroundings. Today although we often think of ourselves as a product of where we live, it does seem true that how we live is a greater determinant at shaping who we are. That ‘how’ comes through ones family’s line but it is conditioned by our surroundings and environmental influence has been known for centuries.

Ralph Emerson stated that we are a patchwork of inheritances having been formed from the accumulation of good and bad influences, having been born equally from good and bad ancestors. This makes sense when one considers that we are all re-groupings of genes that either become expressed or inactive over time depending on how the genes of our ancestors combined.