Fine clothes oftentimes hide a base descent. [ Proverb ]

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

Noble descent and worth, unless united with wealth, are esteemed no more than seaweed. [ Horace ]

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

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 ]

The lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, who shall sing of the gods and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter. [ E. H. Chapin, D.D ]

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. [ Goldsmith ]