Motivational Quotes

Family

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

Best Quotes about Family

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

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

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

Mazzini, Giuseppe

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

Pritchett, V. S.

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

Haley, Alex

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.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

None but a mule denies his family.

Proverb, Arabian

10.

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

Buddha

11.

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

Confucius

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

14.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

16.

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

Proverb, Chinese

17.

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

18.

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

Adler, Felix

19.

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

20.

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

Ann Radcliffe

21.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described --and will be, after our deaths --by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Steinem, Gloria

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A brother is a friend provided by nature.

Pere, Legouve

30.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

Ade, George

32.

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

Proverb, Chinese

33.

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

Johnson, Paul

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Cook, Joseph

37.

I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.

Burroughs, William S.

38.

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

Bach, Richard

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Proverb, Jewish

42.

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

Anna Quindlen

43.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

44.

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

Swindoll, Charles

45.

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

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, Jewish