Quotes about family

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

— Joseph Addison

A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.

— George Ade

The family is the school of duties... founded on love.

— Felix Adler

A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone.

— Aesop

Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.

— Hannah Arendt

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

— Aristotle

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.

— Richard Bach

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

— Francis Bacon

You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.

— Anita Baker

The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.

— Henry Ward Beecher

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.

— Stella Benson

A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. [Proverbs 18:19]

— Bible

You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren't dying. They're merging into big conglomerates.

— Erma Bombeck

Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.

— Anthony Brandt

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

— Jerry Brown

A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another.

— Buddha

Never did I think that I became family entertainment.

— Jimmy Buffett

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.

— William S. Burroughs

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values.

— Charles Caleb Colton

It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.

— Confucius

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

— Confucius

The parents age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.

— Confucius

Of all my wife's relations I like myself the best.

— Joseph Cook

Parents: persons who spend half their time worrying how a child will turn out, and the rest of the time wondering when a child will turn in.

— Ted Cook

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.

— Quentin Crisp

Our relatives are ours by chance, but we can choose our friends.

— Jacques Delille

Family is the most important thing in the world.

— Princess of Wales Diana

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances... in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.

— Charles Dickens

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

— William J. Durant

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

— Benjamin Franklin

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

— James G. Frazer

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended -- and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

— Robert Frost

What a man sows, that shall he and his relations reap.

— Clarissa Graves

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.

— Germaine Greer

Where can a person be better than in the bosom of their family.

— Marmontel Gretry

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

— Matt Groening

Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.

— Sarah J. Hale

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

— Alex Haley

Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

— Jane Howard

The striking point about our model family is not simply the compete-compete, consume-consume style of life it urges us to follow. The striking point, in the face of all the propaganda, is how few Americans actually live this way.

— Louise Kapp Howe

My family begins with me, your family ends with you.

— Iphicrates

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?

— Elizabeth Janeway

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.

— Thomas Jefferson

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

— John Paul II

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

— Paul Johnson

Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavors to appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet less temptation, betray each other to their children.

— Samuel Johnson

The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.

— John Keats

The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt and Helpists know it. They have jumped into the void left by the disappearance of morbid old ladies from the bosom of the American family.

— Florence King

When I do something in my family because I really enjoy it, then my duty has become my pleasure. And it is a pleasure for all the people around me.

— Dr. Jess Lair

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.

— Charles Lamb

The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.

— Ring Lardner

With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.

— Wyndham Lewis

All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.

— Abraham Lincoln

So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it.

— Haniel Long

Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.

— Clare Boothe Luce

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

— Rose Macaulay

I would rather start a family than finish one.

— Don Marquis

The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfillment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.

— Giuseppe Mazzini

Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms, alone, they pose at the mirror, shoulders bare, trying this way and that their hair, or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.

— Phyllis Mcginley

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

— Margaret Mead

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

— H. L. Mencken

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

A man ought to live so that everybody knows he is a Christian... and most of all, his family ought to know.

— Dwight L. Moody

Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

— Martin Mull

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

— Ann Oakley

The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.

— Sandra Day O'connor

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

— Legouve Pere

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

— Francis Picabia

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

— V. S. Pritchett

None but a mule denies his family.

— Arabian Proverb

All people are your relatives, therefore expect only trouble from them.

— Chinese Proverb

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish -- very gently.

— Chinese Proverb

In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.

— Chinese Proverb

Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.

— Chinese Proverb

A small family is soon provided for.

— English Proverb

Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.

— Jewish Proverb

One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.

— Jewish Proverb

When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.

— Jewish Proverb

One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.

— Jonathan Raban

In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.

— Isaac Rosenfeld

For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.

— Christina Rossetti

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— George Santayana

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.

— Charles M. Schulz

The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven's lieutenants.

— William Shakespeare

He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

— George Bernard Shaw

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

— George Bernard Shaw

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

— Susan Sontag

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.

— Freya Stark

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

— Gloria Steinem

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described --and will be, after our deaths --by each of the family members who believe they know us.

— Gloria Steinem

Family... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

— J. August Strindberg

A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.

— Charles Swindoll

Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.

— J. M. Synge

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

— Publius Cornelius Tacitus