Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or mother's life?

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.

We are more than one part of ourselves.

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.

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin.

I live many lives at once.

I am not myself, I am the result of all my ancestors.

In the very traits of his temperament, which have a considerable effect on his life of soul, a person bears within him qualities and impulses that have an obvious connection with those of his physical ancestors.

There's a line that runs between everyone and their ancestors, and you cannot sever that. Maybe disassociate from those ideas but not how you are connected to them. But, you can realise how you've benefited and change how you raise your kids.

I'm a very complex person. I have different people inside me, but it's still me.

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

It's not a secret that I'm, like, 12 different people rolled into one. Like a lot of people are.

The greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in our DNA.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

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.

Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.

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.

I think people have the capacity to be many different things and many seemingly contradictory behaviors.

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

I am a combination of my entire family.

The border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life.

It is never possible to understand completely any other human being; and no individual will ever really understand himself - the complexity is too great and there is not the time to constantly take things apart and examine them.