Motivational Quotes

Family

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

- Luce, Clare Boothe

Best Quotes about Family

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

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

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

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

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

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

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

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

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

Confucius

10.

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

Adler, Felix

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Bach, Richard

14.

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

Proverb, Jewish

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Baker, Anita

18.

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

19.

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

Graves, Clarissa

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb, Chinese

24.

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales

25.

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.

26.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

27.

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.

Lamb, Charles

28.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

Ann Radcliffe

31.

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

Gretry, Marmontel

32.

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

Leo Tolstoy

33.

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

Haley, Alex

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Anna Quindlen

40.

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

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

41.

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

42.

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

Sontag, Susan

43.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

44.

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

Proverb, Chinese

45.

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

Ade, George

46.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

47.

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

48.

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

Delille, Jacques

49.

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

50.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann