Motivational Quotes

Family

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

- Picabia, Francis

Best Quotes about Family

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Stark, Freya

None but a mule denies his family.

Proverb, Arabian

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

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

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Picabia, Francis

10.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

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

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

Swindoll, Charles

14.

Of all my wife's relations I like myself the best.

Cook, Joseph

15.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

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.

Howard, Jane

20.

In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

22.

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

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

27.

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

28.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

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

Proverb, Jewish

30.

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

Ann Radcliffe

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.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Buddha

36.

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

Haley, Alex

37.

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

38.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

39.

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

Proverb, Jewish

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

43.

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

44.

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

Proverb, Chinese

45.

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

46.

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

Leo Tolstoy

47.

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.

48.

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales

49.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

50.

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