William Hazlitt Quotes

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

Characteristics cling to families.

It often runs in families," she remarked: "just as a love for pastry does.

I hold that a strongly marked personality can influence descendants for generations.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

People say the top part of my face looks like my dad's and the bottom part like my mom's. I have his eyes and her nose and mouth.

I have my father to thank for my build and height, and my mother to thank for my lips and eyes.

I should thank my parents for my beauty. It's in my genes.

I take the sporting genes from my dad.

What a mystery blood was -- how did a tiny gesture, a tome of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the ehoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments. the shadow of a face looking back through the years -- that vanished again into the face that was now.

Virtue is not hereditary.

I've inherited the worst of each parent. I have my father's hypochondria and lack of concentration. I have his amorality. I have everything bad that he had. Then I have my mother's surly, pill-like, complaining, whining attitude.

Wrinkles are hereditary. Parents get them from their children.

It's a funny thing when you know someone and you meet their siblings - you get so much a sense of who they are because when you can recognize similar traits in the family, you understand exactly why they are the way they are.

I've got my dad's height and smoking habit. But I think I've got my mum's looks and sensibilities.

If you want to stay young-looking, pick your parents very carefully.

You draw the best things from your parents and family. You're going to pick up some of the bad things as well - there's a temper that runs through my dad's side of the family that I'm not especially keen on picking up a giant block of.

I look a lot like my father when he was my age.

However superficial prevailing views of heredity seem to be, it must be admitted that a person is indeed the bearer of inherited characteristics. This is the one aspect. He must often battle against these inherited traits and rid himself of them in order to bring to fulfillment the talents laid into him before he entered earthly existence.

I know I've got a lot of my mother in me.

I have my mother's nose and my father's bone structure, which I've passed on to my children. My eldest daughter and my mother, when she was young, could be sisters.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.