Twenty thousand years ago the family was the social unit. Now the social unit has become the world, in which it may truthfully be said that each person’s welfare affects that of every other.
—Arthur Compton (1892–1962) American Physicist
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.
—George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh Anglican Poet, Orator, Clergyman
The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.
—Sandra Day O’Connor (b.1930) American Jurist
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.
—John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet
Irreverence ran on both sides of our family… my parents brought me up to think we could all change the world.
—Richard Branson (b.1950) British Entrepreneur
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) English Aristocrat, Poet, Novelist, Writer
Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.
—Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American Novelist
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
—Theodore Hesburgh (1917–2015) American Catholic Educator, Clergyman
I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life, a man who had good friends, fine family – and I don’t think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.
—Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American Singer
Husbands are like fires. They go out when unattended.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor (1919–2016) Hungarian-born Film Actress
There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.
—Mignon McLaughlin (1913–83) American Journalist, Author
Cultivate your own capabilities, your own style. Appreciate the members of your family for who they are, even though their outlook or style may be miles different from yours. Rabbits don’t fly. Eagles don’t swim. Ducks look funny trying to climb. Squirrels don’t have feathers. Stop comparing. There’s plenty of room in the forest.
—Chuck Swindoll (b.1934) American Evangelical Christian Pastor, Author
A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
Oh my son’s my son till he gets him a wife, but my daughter’s my daughter all her life.
—Dinah Craik (1826–87) British Novelist, Essayist, Poet
I have always looked at life as a voyage, mostly wonderful, sometimes frightening. In my family and friends I have discovered treasure more valuable than gold.
—Jimmy Buffett (b.1946) American Musician, Author
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American Poet
Of all my wife’s relations I like myself the best.
—Joseph Cook
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
The family is a haven in a heartless world.
—Christopher Lasch (1932–94) American Historian, Moralist, Social Critic
Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
There’s no such thing as fun for the whole family.
—Jerry Seinfeld (b.1954) American Comedian
One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.
—Euripides (480–406 BCE) Ancient Greek Dramatist
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian Novelist
Family is just accident…. They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are.
—Marsha Norman (b.1947) American Playwright, Screenwriter, Novelist
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V. S. Pritchett (1900–97) British Short Story Writer, Biographer, Memoirist, Literary Critic
Never did I think that I became family entertainment.
—Jimmy Buffett (b.1946) American Musician, Author
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
—Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) French Novelist
If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion.
—Ashleigh Brilliant (b.1933) British Cartoonist, Author
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.
—Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) American Businessperson
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) Polish Catholic Religious Leader
Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit? I don’t want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don’t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new.
—Jeanette Winterson (b.1959) English Novelist, Journalist
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 (1572–1631) English Poet, Cleric
Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.
—Yiddish Proverb
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.
—Mignon McLaughlin (1913–83) American Journalist, Author
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
—Ogden Nash (1902–71) American Writer of Sophisticated Light Verse
Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
—E. W. Howe (1853–1937) American Novelist, Editor
We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
The last word is the most dangerous of infernal machines, and the husband and wife should no more fight to get it than they would struggle for the possession of a lighted bombshell.
—Douglas William Jerrold (1803–57) English Writer, Dramatist, Wit
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable – each segment distinct.
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (b.1939) American Social Activist, Journalist
The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
—Dodie Smith (1896–1990) British Novelist, Playwright, Writer
Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?
—Desiderius Erasmus (c.1469–1536) Dutch Humanist, Scholar
A good friend is my nearest relation.
—Common Proverb
To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.
—Barbara Bush (1925–2018) American First Lady
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
—Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) American Cartoonist, Writer, Artist
I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) English Poet
Only mothers can think of the future, because they give birth to it in their children.
—Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) Russian Writer, Dramatist, Political Activist, Novelist
Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same — and most mothers kiss and scold together.
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
I’ve always believed in magic. When I wasn’t doing anything in this town, I’d go up every night, sit on Mulholland Drive, look out at the city, stretch out my arms, and say, “Everybody wants to work with me. I’m a really good actor. I have all kinds of great movie offers”. I’d just repeat these things over and over, literally convincing myself that I had a couple movies lined up. I’d drive down that hill, ready to take the world on, going, “Movie offers are out there for me, I just don’t hear them yet”. It was like total affirmations, antidotes to the stuff that stems from my family background.
—Jim Carrey (b.1962) Canadian Actor, Comedian
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Every man is an omnibus in which his ancestors ride.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
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.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
There are fathers who do not love their children, but there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.
—Desmond Tutu (b.1931) South African Clergyman
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
—Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American Author
A good father lives so he is a credit to his children.
—Arnold Glasow (1905–98) American Businessman
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
—William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist
Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, and that’s what parents were created for.
—Ogden Nash (1902–71) American Writer of Sophisticated Light Verse
A man ought to live so that everybody knows he is a Christian… and most of all, his family ought to know.
—Dwight L. Moody (1837–99) Christian Religious Leader, Publisher
The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a family all wrapped up in each other.
—Burton Hillis (William E. Vaughan) (1915–77) American Columnist, Author
We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow. Our wiser sons, no doubt will think us so.
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet