Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

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.

We are all very deeply the children of our parents and their parents. Far more than we generally realize.

OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.

People ask me 'Are you copying your dad?' It is in my blood. I have got royal blood coursing through my veins. I can't help myself doing what my father did.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!

You can inherit male-pattern baldness from your mother's father, but not a tendency to fight in the First World War.

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

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.

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.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

I think in any father-son relationship, there's going to be times you say, 'Well, the apple didn't fall far from the tree.'

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

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

You can improve your education and even change your environment but what you really ARE was all settled when your parents www born. SELECTED PARENTS WILL HAVE BETTER CHILDREN.

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

I am a product of my father's work.

I get my light eyes from my mother.

My father had the curved feet, my mother the legs, so I am a bit of both.

The Russell side of my family is a clan with some serious genetics.

I am a reflection of my mother.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

Passion is begotten of passion, and it easily happens, as with the children of great men, that the base is the offspring of the noble.