Motivational Quotes

Family

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

Best Quotes about Family

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Swindoll, Charles

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

Confucius

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

Proverb, Jewish

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.

10.

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

11.

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

Iphicrates

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

Proverb, Chinese

14.

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

Confucius

15.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

16.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

17.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

18.

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

Gretry, Marmontel

19.

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

Twain, Mark

20.

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

Sontag, Susan

21.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

22.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

23.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann

27.

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

28.

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

Haley, Alex

29.

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

Adler, Felix

30.

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

31.

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

Anna Quindlen

32.

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

Johnson, Paul

33.

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

Bach, Richard

34.

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

Ade, George

35.

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

36.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

37.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

38.

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

39.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

40.

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.

41.

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

Delille, Jacques

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.

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

44.

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

45.

One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.

Proverb, Jewish

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

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.

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales