Motivational Quotes

Family

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.

- Alcott, Amos Bronson

Best Quotes about Family

Women's liberationists spread the word that the only peaceful family is one in which either the wife is enslaved or the husband is androgynous.

Tyell, R. Emmett

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.

Raban, Jonathan

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

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.

Steinem, Gloria

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

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.

Frost, Robert

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Johnson, Paul

10.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

11.

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

Graves, Clarissa

12.

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

Bombeck, Erma

13.

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

Confucius

14.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

15.

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.

Dickens, Charles

16.

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

Moody, Dwight L.

17.

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

Sontag, Susan

18.

None but a mule denies his family.

Proverb, Arabian

19.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

20.

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.

Rossetti, Christina

21.

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

Proverb, Chinese

22.

All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

23.

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

Delille, Jacques

24.

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

Proverb, Jewish

25.

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.

Crisp, Quentin

26.

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.

Howard, Jane

27.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

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.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

29.

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

Cook, Joseph

30.

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

Gretry, Marmontel

31.

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

Confucius

32.

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

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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.

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

36.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

37.

They say that blood is thicker than water. Maybe that's why we battle our own with more energy and gusto than we would ever expend on strangers.

David Assael

38.

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.

King, Florence

39.

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.

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

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.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

Never did I think that I became family entertainment.

Buffett, Jimmy

42.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

43.

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.

Keats, John

44.

I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

Anna Quindlen

45.

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

Benson, Stella

46.

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

Proverb, Chinese

47.

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.

Lewis, Wyndham

48.

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

Proverb, Chinese

49.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann

50.

Having a baby's sweet face so close to your own, for so long a time as it takes to nurse'em, is a great tonic for a sad soul.

Erica Eisdorfer