Motivational Quotes

Family

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

- Luce, Clare Boothe

Best Quotes about Family

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

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Confucius

The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.

Picabia, Francis

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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 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

You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.

Baker, Anita

10.

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

11.

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

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.

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

Burroughs, William S.

14.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

15.

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

16.

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

O'connor, Sandra Day

17.

In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.

Proverb, Chinese

18.

Losing a baby is not a thing that you could ever get used to.

Erica Eisdorfer

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Haley, Alex

23.

The hatred of relatives is the most violent.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

24.

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

Ade, George

25.

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

26.

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

Twain, Mark

27.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

28.

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

Cook, Joseph

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Swindoll, Charles

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.

Having a baby's sweet face so close to your own, for so long a time as it takes to nurse'em, is a great tonic for a sad soul.

Erica Eisdorfer

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A small family is soon provided for.

Proverb, English

40.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

Aristotle

41.

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.

42.

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.

43.

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

Leo Tolstoy

44.

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

Proverb, Chinese

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.

Lardner, Ring

49.

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

50.

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.