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

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

Adler, Felix

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

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

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

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.

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

Bach, Richard

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

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.

Arendt, Hannah

10.

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?

Janeway, Elizabeth

11.

It is dismal coming home, when there is nobody to welcome one!

Ann Radcliffe

12.

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.

Mead, Margaret

13.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

14.

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

15.

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

Twain, Mark

16.

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales

17.

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

Proverb, Chinese

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann

21.

Caregiver: that word should weigh more than others on a page, sag it down a bit and wrinkle it, because the simple-sounding job frazzles as it consumes and depletes. Not that it's only gloomy. Caregiving offers many fringe benefits, including the sheer sensory delight of nourishing and grooming, sharing, and playing. There's something uniquely fulfilling about being a lodestar, feeling so deeply needed, and it's fun finding creative ways to gladden a loved one's life. But caregiving does buttonhole you; you're stitched in one place.

Diane Ackerman

22.

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

23.

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

Delille, Jacques

24.

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

Johnson, Paul

25.

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

John Paul II

26.

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.

Addison, Joseph

27.

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

Burroughs, William S.

28.

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

Lardner, Ring

29.

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

Benson, Stella

30.

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

O'connor, Sandra Day

31.

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.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

33.

Never did I think that I became family entertainment.

Buffett, Jimmy

34.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

36.

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.

Cook, Ted

37.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

38.

Family isn't about whose blood you have. It's about who you care about.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

39.

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

Hale, Sarah J.

40.

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

Stark, Freya

41.

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.

42.

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.

43.

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

Proverb, Chinese

44.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

45.

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

46.

I think people that have a brother or sister don't realize how lucky they are. Sure, they fight a lot, but to know that there's always somebody there, somebody that's family.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

47.

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.

Proverb, Jewish

48.

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

49.

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

Strindberg, J. August

50.

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

Proverb, Jewish