Motivational Quotes

Family

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

Best Quotes about Family

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances... in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.

Dickens, 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

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

Brown, Jerry

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

Stark, Freya

Family is the most important thing in the world.

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

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

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

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

Delille, Jacques

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Sontag, Susan

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.

O'connor, Sandra Day

20.

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

21.

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

Confucius

22.

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

23.

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

Anna Quindlen

24.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Proverb, Chinese

28.

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

Tolstoy, Count Leo

29.

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

Proverb, Chinese

30.

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

Adler, Felix

31.

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

Buddha

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

35.

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

Benson, Stella

36.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

41.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

Marquis, Don

42.

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

43.

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

Ann Radcliffe

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.

Proverb, Chinese

48.

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

Confucius

49.

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

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

50.

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