Motivational Quotes

Family

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

- Oakley, Ann

Best Quotes about Family

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

Pritchett, V. S.

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

A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another.

Buddha

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

Swindoll, Charles

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

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

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

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

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.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

11.

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

John Paul II

12.

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

Ade, George

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Confucius

16.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

17.

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

18.

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

Haley, Alex

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

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.

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

Adler, Felix

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

26.

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

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Stark, Freya

28.

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

Anna Quindlen

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

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.

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

Baker, Anita

34.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Proverb, Chinese

38.

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

Lardner, Ring

39.

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

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

40.

None but a mule denies his family.

Proverb, Arabian

41.

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Picabia, Francis

42.

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

Ann Radcliffe

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.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

45.

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

46.

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

47.

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

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

Graves, Clarissa

49.

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

50.

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