Can man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother. [ Mrs. Marian Lewes Cross (pen name George Eliot) ]

All our opinions, sentiments, principles, prejudices, religious beliefs, are really but the result of birthplace: how different would they be, had we been born and reared at the antipodes of our respective lands. [ De Finod ]

The brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. [ Holmes ]

Whatever strengthens our local attachments is favorable both to individual and national character, our home, our birthplace, our native land. Think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words, and if you have any intellectual eyes, you will then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism. [ Southey ]

Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation. [ Washington Irving ]