Motivational Quotes

Family

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

Best Quotes about Family

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

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

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

Graves, Clarissa

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

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

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

Ann Radcliffe

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

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

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

Swindoll, Charles

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

10.

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

11.

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

12.

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

Proverb, Jewish

13.

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.

14.

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

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

Johnson, Paul

16.

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

Confucius

17.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

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

19.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Baker, Anita

23.

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

Anna Quindlen

24.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

25.

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

26.

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

Lardner, Ring

27.

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

Sontag, Susan

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Ade, George

31.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

32.

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

33.

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

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Haley, Alex

35.

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

Ziglar, Zig

36.

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

O'connor, Sandra Day

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

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.

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

43.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Confucius

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

John Paul II

50.

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

Stark, Freya