Motivational Quotes

Family

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

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Family

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

Delille, Jacques

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

Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.

Groening, Matt

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

Ade, George

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

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

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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.

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

Cook, Joseph

11.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

Oakley, Ann

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Haley, Alex

15.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

16.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.

Benson, Stella

18.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

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

Proverb, Chinese

20.

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

John Paul II

21.

Never did I think that I became family entertainment.

Buffett, Jimmy

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.

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

24.

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

25.

I think people that have a brother or sister don't realize how lucky they are. Sure, they fight a lot, but to know that there's always somebody there, somebody that's family.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

26.

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

27.

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

28.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

29.

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

30.

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

Ziglar, Zig

31.

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

Confucius

32.

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

33.

He that raises a large family does, indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

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

Johnson, Paul

35.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

36.

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

37.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

38.

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

Stark, Freya

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.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Burroughs, William S.

49.

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

50.

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

Iphicrates