Breed is stronger than pasture. [ George Eliot ]

By blood a king, in heart a clown. [ Tennyson ]

I have no urns, no dusty monuments;
No broken images of ancestors,
Wanting an ear, or nose; no forged tales
Of long descents, to boast false honors from. [ Ben Jonson ]

He that to ancient wreaths can bring no more
From his own worth, dies bankrupt on the score. [ Cleveland ]

Great families of yesterday we show,
And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who. [ Daniel De Foe ]

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors. [ Voltaire ]

Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name. [ Lucan ]

He who boasts of his descent, praises the deeds of another. [ Seneca ]

Pride, in boasting of family antiquity, makes duration stand for merit. [ Zimmermann ]

He who boasts of his lineage boasts of that which does not properly belong to him. [ Seneca ]

It is of no consequence of what parents any man is born, so that he be a man of merit. [ Horace ]

I am no herald to inquire of men's pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. [ Burke ]

Philosophy does not regard pedigree; she did not receive Plato as a noble, but she made him so. [ Seneca ]

Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own. [ Ovid ]

What is birth to a man if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring? [ Sir P. Sidney ]

What can they see in the longest kingly line in Europe, save that it runs back to a successful soldier? [ Walter Scott ]

From yon blue heaven above us bent, the grand old gardener and his wife smile at the claims of long descent. [ Tennyson ]

He that boasts of his ancestors, the founders and raisers of a family, doth confess that he hath less virtue. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too. [ Lord Greville ]

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with. [ Sheridan ]

The glory of ancestors sheds a light around posterity; it allows neither their good nor bad qualities to remain in obscurity. [ Sallust ]

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like a potato, - the only good belonging to him is underground. [ Sir Thomas Overbury ]

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry. [ Hosea Ballou ]

It has long seemed to me that it would be more honorable to our ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more. [ Horace Mann ]

The happiest lot for a man as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it. [ Whately ]

It is, indeed, a blessing, when the virtues of noble races are hereditary; and do derive themselves from the imitation of virtuous ancestors. [ Nabb ]

The origin of all mankind was the same; it is only a clear and good conscience that makes a man noble, for that is derived from heaven itself. [ Seneca ]

Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural nor unjust nor impolitic. [ Burke ]

I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate. [ General Skobeleff ]

Those who depend on the merits of their ancestors may be said to search in the roots of the tree for those fruits which the branches ought to produce. [ Barrow ]

People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants. [ Macaulay ]

It is a revered thing to see an ancient castle not in decay; how much more to behold an ancient family which have stood against the waves and weathers of time! [ Bacon ]

Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. [ Lowell ]

Title and ancestry render a good man more illustrious, but an ill one more contemptible. Vice is infamous, though in a prince, and virtue honorable, though in a peasant. [ Addison ]

High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of. [ Bishop Warburton ]

I am one who finds within me a nobility that spurns! the idle pratings of the great, and their mean boasts of what their fathers were, while they themselves are fools effeminate. [ Percival ]

The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked on the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity. [ Gibbon ]

Let him speak of his own deeds, and not of those of his forefathers. High birth is mere accident, and not a virtue; for if reason had controlled birth, and given empire only to the worthy, perhaps Arbaces would have been Xerxes, and Xerxes Arbaces. [ Metastasio ]

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past. [ Lowell ]

It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves; and fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy in a long series of revolutions; beside, for a man to spend his life in pursuit of a title, that serves only when he dies to furnish out an epitaph, is below a wise man's business. [ Seneca ]

Take the title of nobility which thou hast received by birth, but endeavor to add to it another, that both may form a true nobility. There is between the nobility of thy father and thine own the same difference which exists between the nourishment of the evening and of the morrow. The food of yesterday will not serve three for today, and will not give thee strength for the next. [ Jamakchari ]