Forbears Quotes & Sayings

If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated local populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears.
co-author with Niles Eldridge — Stephen Jay Gould

All humans at some time experience injustice, assault, disqualification, invasion and betrayal. No person is completely shielded. We need not trace our family trees very far back or study for long what life was like for our forbears to uncover humanity's abusiveness. The inherited scars of our multigenerational families exist in our family systems as we know them today. The abuse of the past often exists as the shame of today, and the shame is perpetuated through our patterns of interaction. — Merle A. Fossum

As a traveller in some far wilderness might by chance pick up a handful of stones from the ground, examine them idly and then, with mounting excitement, first surmise, next think it probable and finally feel certain that they must be diamonds; or as a sea-captain, voyaging in distant waters, might round an unknown cape, busy himself for an hour with the handling of the ship and only then, and gradually, realize that he - he himself - must have sailed into none other than that undiscovered, fabled ocean known to his forbears by nothing but legend and rumour; so now, little by little, there stole upon this hunter the stupefying, all-but-incredible knowledge of what it must be that he had seen. — Richard Adams

In the second half of life, our old compasses no longer work. The magnetic fields alter. The new compass that we need cannot be held in our hand, only in our heart. We read it not with our mind alone, but with our soul.

Now we yearn for wholeness. We yearn to remember the parts of ourselves that we have forgotten, to nourish those that we have starved, to express those we have silenced, and to bring into the light those we have cast into the shadows. On this quest for wholeness, we must let go of cliches of adult life, both positive and negative . . . Using the best information available , each of us must find his own way.

To varying degrees, all of us are trying to break out of . . . the "life structure" that we have built during the first part of our lives. — Mark Gerzon

Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. — Wendell Berry

In conversation we are sustained by the wisdom of those who have gone before us. We are also empowered to discern how we will face the challenges of both the present and the future. Reading is essential to this conversational way of life, as we often cannot literally converse with our forbears or with those who are following similar vocations in other places. We read as a way of listening to the wisdom of others. The conversation continues as we reply to this wisdom both internally and externally. Internally, we reply as we grapple to make sense of this wisdom in our own context. Externally, we reply to our reading as we discuss it with our church or work community. — C. Christopher Smith

A good man not only forbears those gratifications which are forbidden by reason and religion, but even restrains himself in unforbidden instances. — Francis Atterbury

Our forbears worked hard this difficult land, and their reward was the freedom and independence of self-sufficiency. — James H. Douglas Jr.

I remember writing all kinds of stories as a kid, but I really don't know what the first thing was. Whatever it was, I'm certain it was bloody and twisted, though, and probably involved talking cats. — Alistair Cross

A Great Man Has Two Hearts.
One Bleeds And The Other Forbears. — Kahlil Gibran

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others. — Ellen Key

You're right - piercings are good." Prophet was the one who was high now. Tom managed to wrest back control by bucking at an angle that made Prophet stiffen and give a near whimper. "Yeah, Tommy, like that." One of his hands was on Prophet's shoulder as he rocked his hips back and forth, the other on Prophet's leaking cock. Prophet was matching him stroke for stroke, his head against the headboard, which in turn slammed the wall, the bed threatening to break apart. Tom's entire body was reduced to a heartbeat. "Tommy!" He didn't know why he hadn't wanted Prophet to call him that. Now, he didn't want Prophet to call him anything else. Tom sped up, his breath coming in halting gasps. — S.E. Jakes

All the latchkey children cursed and smashed bottles, teased about underwear, and puffed on those unfiltered cigarettes that only the cowboys could roll. — Bremer Acosta

When you're a child the world forbears you, allows you your flights of imagination, your feelings of specialness. But sooner or later the privileges are withdrawn, and all you're left with is a stunned bitterness at the realisation that you're just the same as everybody else. — Michael Marshall Smith

Make not, when you work a deed of shame, The scoundrel's plea, 'My forbears did the same. — Al-Ma'arri

The average American of today is intellectually so far removed from his forbears that instead of regarding government with apprehension, he is more likely to regard it as a virtual parent, concerned only with protecting and helping him — George Reisman

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you. — Bill Bryson

Republicans say they want citizenship to truly mean something. Let's be equal-opportunity about it and test everyone, including those very Republicans and others whose forbears came here generations ago. — Eric Liu

A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come. — A.S. Byatt

Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could propose marriage to a genteel British lady. Perhaps cruelest of all was a cartoon in Punch magazine, depicting a gorilla with a sign on its neck. Deliberately evoking the anti-slavery tract of Darwin's Wedgwood forbears, the sign read:Am I a Man and a Brother? — Jonathan Clements

No one touches you. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I whispered. I hated the eagerness apparent in my voice. — B.B. Reid

Men were doomed to repeat the sins of not only their fathers, but all their ancient forbears on back to Cain. That was the true mark upon man, scripted in his very blood. — Charles Dodd White

If a person who can [give a blow] forbears, there is merit in that. — Swami Vivekananda

When our forbears - yours and mine - came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life. — Robert Kennedy

Our forbears came to these shores not for free stuff, but for freedom. The chance to make their own way, create a different life. They came here because they knew that God made them free to make their own way in life, take the risk, do their best and take responsibility for their own lives. They came here because they wanted to serve Him in the way they believed, not as they were told. — Glenn Beck

The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves. — Jack London

For what concerns diversity of rites in the sacred liturgy, the Apostolic See has always made its position clear: not only it does not condemn diversity, but it eagerly and willingly grants to each nation the right to keep and preserve the legitimate customs and traditions of its forbears. — Pope Leo XIII

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Willa Cather

It's a man I would die to protect even as he dies to save the soul of this rebellion. — Pierce Brown

For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears. — Walter Scott

A promise, a bond, a joy, a love for the ages, for the history books. ... But what was love but pain? — Melissa De La Cruz

The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business -whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town. — Allan Gurganus

Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last
what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn
whatever they had been, they were men! — H.P. Lovecraft