Quotes: Heredity

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.

We know from our clinical experience in the practice of medicine that in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, the individual and his background of heredity are just as important, if not more so, as the disease itself.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

Here he tells us that the new birth is first of all ‘not of blood’. You don’t get it through the blood stream, through heredity. Your parents can give you much, but they cannot give you this.

Freedom was conditioned by man’s physical body, heredity, and environment.

Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.