Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Predecessors. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Predecessors Quotes And Sayings by 98 Authors including Thomas E. Mann,Washington Irving,Sydney J. Harris,Moliere,Aimee Friedman for you to enjoy and share.
Whose best and most fruitful gift was the power of admiration, which made it possible for me to learn. Now, as in my youth, I am looking up to the truly great creations of the past, which I see high above my own and which alone deserve the name of greatness.
How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.
Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.
The ancients, sir, are the ancients, and we are the people of today.
It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.
As years passed away I have formed the habit of looking back upon that former self as upon another person, the remembrance of whose emotions has been a solace in adversity and added zest to the enjoyment of prosperity.
They had no past. They had no future. They just were.
What term do you employ when you speak of your progenitor?"
I answered with the term I'd always wanted to employ.
"Sonovabitch."
"To his face?" she asked.
"I never see his face."
"He wears a mask?"
"In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.
How
long did it take for a past to die?
My successor may need to be more modern than I am. It's a question of generations.
What I am has been to a considerable extent determined by what my forebears were, by how they chose to treat this place while they lived in it;
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
The previous generation paved the way for my generation to gallop unheeded into jobs previously reserved for men.
Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.
A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
The fact is that every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
Some things belong to the past.
And, they would still be alive today ... If they hadn't died, that is
When one historical period is replaced by another, there is
always a group of people left over from the old society
Our children are our sequels. Our parents are our prequels. All living beings are our equals.
Introspection is always retrospection
The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.
OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.
following his dad and uncle.' Rose
no matter how hard a person ran, no matter how fresh the start they gave themselves, the past had a way of reaching across the years to catch them.
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
We are tomorrow's past.
Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation.
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
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.
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
The tradition of past generations weighs like the Alps on the brains of the living.
Brother. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute
Heir follows heir, as wave succeeds to wave.
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.
kin, not ancestors. Our main difference from
Their looks and personalities were still intact, but some thing had atrophied ever so slightly. Their faces bore the distinct wear of goals gone too long unfulfilled.
what they had endured
The past is but the past of a beginning.
That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.
No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
We all stand on the shoulders of the past generation.
Who is the descendant of the slavemasters a descendant of slaves to fight other people in thier own country?
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Boomers were the original Millennials.
Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,
The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;
Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,
And Poets once had promis'd they should last.
In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos
Theirs is the present who can praise the past.
flourished between three generations
Genealogists live in the past lane.
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
The world turned, and new stories rose up, and the legends of the old days faltered a little, or turned themselves in their course to keep up with the lives of their people, and the lives of great-grandchildren of those they had first known.
My great-great-great-grandmother
History works itself out in the living.
One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
I'm the heir apparent to the heir presumptive.
A sibling represents a person's past, present, and future
While we must always strive to grow beyond those who come before us, we must revere and learn from those that broke the ground originally, endeavor to honor their legacy, and then continue in our own vision.
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.
Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.
The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains
What greater honor,
when a person moves forward,
they leave behind in each of us,
the best of what they were.
We were descended from royalty.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence.
We've uncovered some embarrassing ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Some horse thieves, and some people killed on Saturday nights. One of my relatives, unfortunately, was even in the newspaper business.
Egyptians in the pre-dynastic times before 3200 B.C., from which people I show that the Dogon are partially descended culturally, and probably physically as well.
In the presence of grandparent and grandchild, past and future merge in the present.
It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more.
My mother, before she became my mother, was followed by the man with whom she would make love, who would cover her with his name, who would annihilate her with his alphabet.
As though there were a tie And obligation to posterity. We get them, bear them, breed, and nurse: What has posterity done for us. That we, lest they their rights should lose, Should trust our necks to gripe of noose?
In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.
They lived long that have lived well.
Human beings disappear; their histories remain.
Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.
The future qualifies the past.
Who they are today isn't who they were then.
A plaited link exists between every person and his or her ancestors, not simply through genealogical records, but in the same manner that the soul of a child, from which we sprang from, traces a direct connection to the matured soul of the adult.
Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.
There is no Past, so long as Books shall live!
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
Old grandsires talk of yesterday with sorrow, And for our children we reserve tomorrow.
My family history begins with me, but yours ends with you.
forty years earlier. Quite
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.
YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.
We are very fond of some families because they can be traced beyond the Conquest, whereas indeed the farther back, the worse, as being the nearer allied to a race of robbers and thieves.
Ancestor. In fact, this clock tells us that all seven billion people alive today can trace their maternal lineage to one woman who lived in Africa 170,000 years ago, dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.
Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.
Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
Since my brother died in 1982, my parents and I had formed a shaky tripod of a family; now that I'd lost my father too, it was too easy for me to glimpse a future point where I alone was the keeper of not just my own childhood memories, but of my family lore.
I've begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children's and then our grandchildren's eyes.
I'm a grandfather now.
History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares.
The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.
The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.
The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence.
People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.