quotations about family
We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn't get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.
PAUL REISER
Familyhood
A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure. To provide stability. Not that a woman can't provide stability, I'm not saying that... It does take a father, though.
TOM DELAY
interview, Feb. 2004
In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting.
BRAHMA
The Laws of Manu
Raising a family wasn't something I put on my resumé, but I have to ask myself, would I apply for the same job again?
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
EVAN ESAR
The Comic Encyclopedia
In the family, happiness is in the ratio in which each is serving the others, seeking one another's good, and bearing one another's burdens.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Marriage is the agreement to let a family happen.
BETTY JANE WYLIE
Family: An Exploration
It's very hard to grow up in a perfect family when you're not perfect.
E. L. JAMES
Fifty Shades of Grey
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
MARGARET MEAD
Kate Rowinski's The Quotable Mom
The number one need in all people is the need for acceptance, the need to experience a sense of belonging to something and someone. The need for acceptance is more powerful in your family than anywhere else.... If that need is not met by your family, trust me, your kids will go elsewhere to seek it in order to find approval and acceptance.
PHIL MCGRAW
Family First
Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.
SUSAN LIEBERMAN
New Traditions
In one family, all goes by two and two. If a member of it has any interest, he or she will confide it to some one other; but the rest know nothing. In another family, all feel what touches one; nothing is kept dark from the father and mother, brothers and sisters--all share. This family habit is by far the better, it strengthens the tie between the members, and makes the home one home.
CHARLES BUXTON
Notes of Thought
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?
ELIZABETH JANEWAY
Ms., Nov. 1981
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.
ERMA BOMBECK
The Family: The Ties that Bind--and Gag!
I'm from such an old family, it's been condemned.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse
Family ... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
The Son of a Servant
Children keep a family together, especially when one can't get a babysitter.
FREDERICK SHEPPERD
Electricity on the Farm
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.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Francis Willis, Jr., April 18, 1790
Imitation both unconscious and conscious is par excellence the educational method of the family. It is plain that a considerable part of the adaptation of living beings to their environment, i.e., of beings that are born plastic, is passed on from generation to generation through imitation. Were this not so, much if not all of the road traversed by one generation would have to be travelled by the next generation from the very beginning and without short-cuts. Consequently there would be little chance for the novel adaptation, the propitious individual variation, that constitutes progress.
ELSIE WORTHINGTON CLEWS PARSONS
The Family: An Ethnographical and Historical Outline