Our ancestors are totally essential to our every waking moment, although most of us don't even have the faintest idea about their lives, their trials, their hardships or challenges.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I don't think many of us face the same sort of physical adventures our ancestors did, at least not on a daily basis.
To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.
We must strive to become good ancestors.
I think my ancestors had to be enormously strong emotionally and very courageous.
In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
I've always thought you have to live life looking forwards, not backwards. I've had no interest at all in who my ancestors are.
It is possible that strong levels of belief in God, gods, spirits or the supernatural might have given our ancestors considerable comforts and advantages.
For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the best criteria by which to judge our fellow humans.
Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.
No opposing quotes found.