“Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.”

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

Sacrifice is a state of mind in which our thoughts turn with longing [toward Heaven, the Ancestors], It is the supreme expression of loyalty, love, and respect.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has a magical way of connecting fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren and ancestors back down the line. – From The Brooklyn Nine

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.