Family Quotes
Most popular family quotes
In a man's family, respect and listening are the source of harmony.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
There is no school equal to a decent home and no teachers equal to honest virtuous parents.
Unblessed is the child who does not honor his parents; but if reverent and obedient to them, the child will receive the same from his own.
Lucky that parent whose children make them happiness in life and not their grief, the anguished disappointment of their hopes.
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communications is open, and rules are flexible – the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.
Every conversation, every cuddle, aver kiss and caress, even every disagreement, adds another brushstroke to the picture of home you paint with the days and hours of your life.
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Make home a priority in life.
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
What the world needs is not romantic lovers who are sufficient unto themselves, but husbands and wives who live in communities, relate to other people, carry on useful work and willingly give time and attention to their children.
The family is the school of duties - founded on love.
The family is the natural center of human life.
The Church tries to demonstrate the modern mentality that the family founded on marriage has two essential values for all societies and all cultures: stability and fecundity.
Roles of fatherhood, motherhood, being a son or daughter, and brother or sister, are the basis of any society, and without them every society would lose consistency and turn toward anarchy.
The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you.
A family vacation is one where you arrive with five bags, four kids and seven I-thought-you-packed-its.
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future. We make discoveries about ourselves.
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
Heredity is what sets the parents of a teenager wondering about each other.
Few things are more satisfying than seeing your children have teenagers of their own.
Even a family tree has to have some sap.
Oh, to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.
We never know the love of the parent until we become parents ourselves.
He that has no fools, knaves nor beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.
If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.
Before most people start boasting about their family tree, they usually do a good pruning job.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
The family fireside is the best of schools.
Making the decision to have a child—it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
The thorn from the bush one has planted, nourished and pruned, pricks most deeply and draws more blood.
Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.
You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around—and why his parents will always wave back.
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day.
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.
If you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family.
Sibling relationships - and 80 percent of Americans have at least one - outlast marriages, survive the death of parents, resurface after quarrels that would sink any friendship. They flourish in a thousand incarnations of closeness and distance, warmth, loyalty and distrust.
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.
When I have spoken of my family in the past, there is always someone who wants to know how such love and fury could coexist, and I don't understand the question. It seems either naive or disingenuous. Families seem to me to be made of love and fury. The world is mostly water; we are mostly water, but we don't ask how such hydrogen and oxygen can coexist. We just drink it and live. Maybe we wish it were champagne, or root beer, or cider, but we're not foolish enough to wish it were liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen.
Family life! The United Nations is child's play compared to the tugs and splits and need to understand and forgive in any family.
Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.
Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
The presidency is temporary - but the family is permanent.
God gives us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.
One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family.
The families of one's friends are always a disappointment.
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
After all, what is a pedestrian? He is a man who has two cars —one being driven by his wife, the other by one of his children.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men women an occasional animal and the common cold.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A family is but too often a commonwealth of malignants.
You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.
To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.
A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite.
We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.
Behind every successful man is a proud wife and a surprised mother-in-law.
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
A family is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to do it rightly is an art like any other.
The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants.
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect.
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.
Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.
The American notion of family is perhaps the most romanticized, deep-rooted, and misery-producing fantasy of the last hundred years.
Having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family; especially if they live in another city.
The family. I believe more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly, and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.
The family is as confining as it is nurturing. Our need for this community keeps us in a cage of other people's desires and expectations; some of us spend our lives peering our through the bars at what seems to be a larger world.
Dear, dear, the miniature world of a family! All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.
The family is a court of justice which never shuts down.
Family values are a little like family vacations—subject to changeable weather and remembered more fondly with the passage of time. Though it rained all week at the beach, it's often the momentary rainbows that we remember.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
The cold truth is that family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by 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.
A good many family trees are shady.
Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.
How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commonplace domestic situation.
Finally democracy is catching up with the old, hierarchical, father-dominated family: the family is being democratized.
In the last states of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.
Every family has a story that it tells itself—that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened.
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.
Good families are fortresses with many windows and doors to the outer world.
Family. A snug kind of word.
It is in the love of one's family only that heartfelt happiness is known. I feel it when we are all together beyond what can be imagined.
In families where there is or is not poverty, there is commonly discord: if a kingdom be...a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.
Family is what grounds you.
Family life is an encroachment on private life.
The first world we find ourselves in is a family that is not of our choosing.
Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.
The Family is the Heart's Country.
They are the we of me.
There is an interconnectedness among members that bonds the family, much like mountain climbers who rope themselves together when climbing a mountain, so that if someone should slip or need support, he's held up by the others until he regains his footing.
In the provincial South family ties rival the rampant kudzu for entanglement and tenacity.
One of life's few really reliable pleasures: to have a family you love, and to leave them for a week.
The task of each family is also the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.
The Family is an absolute monarchy in miniature.
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.
There is a little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
Unkindness is death to the home. One unkind, unsocial, critical, eternally dissatisfied member can destroy any family.
What is a family, after all, except memories?—haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen (called the "junk drawer" in our household, for good reason)
A family is but too often but a commonwealth of malignants.
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.
In the nurturing family . . . parents see themselves as empowering leaders not as authoritative bosses. They see their job primarily as one of teaching their children how to be truly human in all situations.
The family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family.
Family life is something like an iceberg: most people are aware of only about one-tenth of what is going on—the tenth that they can see and hear.
The Family is a petty despotism.
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever wish to.
Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious.
The family is our first culture, and, like all cultures, it wants to make known its norms and mores. It does so through daily life, but it also does so through family stories which underscore, in a way invariably clear to its members, the essentials, like the unspoken and unadmitted family policy on marriage or illness. Or suicide. Or who the family saints and sinners are, or how much anger can be expressed and by whom.
The Family! Home of all social evils, a charitable institution for indolent women, a prison workshop for the slaving breadwinner, and a hell for children.
If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relation to do the business.
I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.
Families are great murderers of the creative impulse, particularly husbands.
You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you'll always hear them calling your name.
Before the cards that one is dealt by life are the cards that fate has dealt. One's family.
Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.
Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
