Family Quotes

My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.

Louisa May Alcott

Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.

Henri Frederic Amiel

A "good" family, it seems, is one that used to be better.

Cleveland Amory

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants.

Aristotle

God knows the feelings in every human heart. He can soften sorrow and lead when there seems to be no light. Prayer can give guidance and confidence. It reminds us that no one need be alone in this world. If all else fails, remember, God and one other person can be a family.

Marvin J. Ashton

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

Stella Benson

I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.

Ugo Betti

We are each other's business: We are each other's magnitude and bond.

Gwendolyn Brooks

I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other - I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.

Samuel Butler

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

John Donne

There's no vocabulary: for love within a family, love that's lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech. This love is silent.

T. S. Eliot

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.

Lee Iacocca

There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.

James Earl Jones

I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

Robert Kennedy

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?

Rose Macaulay

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 fulfilment 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.

Giuseppe Mazzini

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

Pope John Paul II

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.

Christina Rossetti

The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.

Dodie Smith

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy

Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.

Wendy Wasserstein

Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

Evelyn Waugh