Motivational Quotes

Family

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

Best Quotes about Family

People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.

Ziglar, Zig

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

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?

Macaulay, Rose

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

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

John Paul II

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

Stark, Freya

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going,'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'

Jeff Foxworthy

10.

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.

Lair, Dr. Jess

11.

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

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.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

14.

None but a mule denies his family.

Proverb, Arabian

15.

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

16.

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

17.

In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.

Proverb, Chinese

18.

Never did I think that I became family entertainment.

Buffett, Jimmy

19.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Confucius

23.

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

Iphicrates

24.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann

25.

No matter where you live, brothers are brothers and sisters are sisters. The bonds that keep family close are the same no matter where you are.

Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

30.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

31.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

Yeats, William Butler

32.

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

Graves, Clarissa

33.

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

Burroughs, William S.

34.

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

35.

Losing a baby is not a thing that you could ever get used to.

Erica Eisdorfer

36.

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

Adler, Felix

37.

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

38.

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.

Niebuhr, Reinhold

39.

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

40.

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

Anna Quindlen

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Proverb, Jewish

44.

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

Haley, Alex

45.

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.

Howe, Louise Kapp

46.

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.

Mcginley, Phyllis

47.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

48.

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

Proverb, Jewish

49.

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales

50.

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