Great quotes on family and relatives, a collection of authorial aphorisms on the fundamental core of society, even if on the whole it is not always idyllic.
A family in harmony will prosper in everything.
Chinese Proverb
There are only two families in the world, the haves and the have-nots.
Miguel De Cervantes
The family is the school of duties… founded on love.
Felix Adler
The babe at first feeds upon the mother’s bosom, but it is always on her heart.
Henry Ward Beecher
Close relatives, just like shoes, are the ones that cause the most trouble.
Carl William Brown
A writer is always unwelcome at the family table. Because we notice things. And then we use them.
Elizabeth Hardwick
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
Anthony Brandt
The parents age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.
Confucius
Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances… in short, by the influence of woman, in the lofty character of wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.
Charles Dickens
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
James G. Frazer
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.
Richard Bach
The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.
Francis Picabia
All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo tolstoy
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Francis Bacon
Cruel is the strife of brothers.
Aristotle
To be generalists, we could say that we are all children of God, that is, of an unknown father.
Carl William Brown
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
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.
Samuel Johnson
The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.
Mario Puzo
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 family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for? its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.
Florence Nightingale
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
Man is certainly an animal at least as stupid as his lower relatives, only he is also dangerously and destructively vain.
Carl William Brown
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.
Leslie Dreyfous
The family you come from isn’t as important as the family you’re going to have.
Ring Lardner
So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty. All other pacts of love or fear derive from it and are modeled upon it.
Haniel Long
He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.
Jeremy Taylor
All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Count Leo Tolstoy
Family is the most important thing in the world.
Princess Diana
A mother’s love is fashioned after God’s enduring love. It is endless and unfailing like the love of Him above.
Helen Steiner Rice
I would rather start a family than finish one.
Don Marquis
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.
Margaret Mead
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H. L. Mencken
In every dispute between parent and child, both cannot be right, but they may be, and usually are, both wrong. It is this situation which gives family life its peculiar hysterical charm.
Isaac Rosenfeld
At funerals, the dead are the ones who feel better; at least they avoid the priests’ bullshit and the relatives’ gossip.
Carl William Brown
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
Charles M. Schulz
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
A family with an old person has a living treasure of gold.
Chinese Proverb
If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Love makes a family.
Gigi Kaeser
A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another.
Buddha
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
Quentin Crisp
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
Matt Groening
I learned about the strength you can get from a close family life. I learned to keep going, even in bad times. I learned not to despair, even when my world was falling apart. I learned that there are no free lunches. And I learned the value of hard work.
Lee Iacocca
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
John Paul II
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.
Dr. Jess Lair
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
There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.
Ann Oakley
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
V. S. Pritchett
God, Country, and Family, but above all Money, these are the cornerstones of hypocrisy.
Carl William Brown
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.
George Santayana
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
Susan Sontag
The hatred of relatives is the most violent.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus
Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.
Mark Twain
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.
Oscar Wilde
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
Better a loving single-parent family than a ‘conventional’ family where the parents hate each other and the father is a demagogue.
Moby
Frankly, I’m fed up with politicians in Washington lecturing the rest of us about family values. Our families have values. But our government doesn’t.
Bill clinton
If your family tree does not fork, you might be a redneck.
Jeff Foxworthy
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.
George Bernard Shaw
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
Margaret Mead
The holy restricted family: A loves B, somehow, and is loved back, one way or another! Neither of them gives a damn about the rest of the alphabet!
Carl William Brown
Family life is not a computer program that runs on its own; it needs continual input from everyone.
Neil Kurshan
Family is what grounds you.
Angelina Jolie
A close relative is one you see occasionally between family funerals.
Author Unknown
Our relatives are ours by chance, but we can choose our friends.
Jacques Delille
Lord, confound this surly sister, blight her brow with blotch and blister, cramp her larynx, lung and liver, in her guts a galling give her.
J. M. Synge
A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.
George Ade
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.
Amos Bronson Alcott
Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.
Richard Bach
You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.
Anita Baker
There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.
Henry Ward Beecher
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.
Erma Bombeck
Never did I think that I became family entertainment.
Jimmy Buffet
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The parents age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.
Confucius
Parents: persons who spend half their time worrying how a child will turn out, and the rest of the time wondering when a child will turn in.
Ted Cook
Alternatives to marriage and the traditional family: cohabitation, communes, celibacy, vows, suicide…
Carl William Brown
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
William J. Durant
What a man sows, that shall he and his relations reap.
Clarissa Graves
Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender — these form the wealth of home.
Sarah J. Hale
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.
Louise Kapp Howe
A good many family trees are shady.
Robert Elliott Gonzales
The Family is the Country of the heart.
Giuseppe Mazzini
The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.
Gloria Steinem
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.
Erma Bombeck
There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
Freya Stark
Family… the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house — fathers, and a hell for children.
August J. Strindberg
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
Martin Mull
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.
Reinhold Niebuhr
The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come.
Sandra Day O’Connor
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
George Eliot
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.
Phil Mcgraw
If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.
Quentin Crisp
Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.
André Maurois
Under any system of society … the family holds the future in its bosom.
Charles Franklin Thwing
For the Kennedys, politics was a family tradition; for the Holy Family, killing them was a tradition as well.
Carl William Brown
Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
Henri-Frederic Amiel
Marriage is to family what legs are to a table.
Betty Jane Wylie
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.
William Butler Yeats
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
The difference between us is that my family begins with me, whereas yours ends with you.
Author Unknown
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
A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle.
The Holy Bible
A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
Charles Swindoll
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.
Gloria Steinem
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
George Bernard Shaw
The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven’s lieutenants.
William Shakespeare
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 dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.
Ronald David Laing
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
Evan Esar
Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.
Ann Oakley
It seems to be almost inevitable that the man who accepts a subordinate economic position in the Family degenerates into a loafer and a tyrant.
Helen Dendy Bosanquet
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
John Paul Ii
The family that stays together probably has only one car.
Knofel Staton
The family and the couple are by far the most disintegrating centers of false moral, intellectual, and spiritual well-being in capitalist society.
Carl William Brown
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
Bernard Shaw
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
Stella Benson
Never did I think that I became family entertainment.
Jimmy Buffet
The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
Confucius
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
Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
Alex Haley
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
The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
Paul Johnson
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.
Charles Lamb
Women know what men have long forgotten. The ultimate economic and spiritual unit of any civilization is still the family.
Clare Boothe Luce
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
A brother is a friend provided by nature.
Legouve Pere
The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You hear a lot of dialogue on the death of the American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re merging into big conglomerates.
Erma Bombeck
A family is a unit composed not only of children, but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
Ogden Nash
Woman is the highest, holiest, most precious gift to man. Her mission and throne is the family, and if anything is withheld that would make her more efficient, useful, or happy in that sphere, she is wronged, and has not her rights.
John Todd
He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home and broods a nest of sorrows.
Jeremy Taylor
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.
Louise Kapp Howe
Marriage is the agreement to let a family happen.
Betty Jane Wylie
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
In one family, every little plan or question is discussed amid bickering and irritation. In another, without the least effort, every discussion goes on amid perfect peace. This is just as easy, and infinitely more agreeable: only, in many homes it does not happen to be the family habit.
Charles Buxton
The most socially subversisve institution of our time is the one-parent family.
Paul Johnson
Children keep a family together, especially when one can’t get a babysitter.
Frederick Shepperd
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.
Emmett R. Tyell
My family begins with me, your family ends with you.
Author Unknown
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.
Charles Wadworth
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
Zig Ziglar
The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
G. K. Chesterton
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Francis Bacon
A large family party is rather too much like a flight of tomtits; everlasting twitter, but no conversation; gregariousness without companionship.
Charles Buxton
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
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
The family spirit has rendered man carnivorous.
Francis Picabia
As a single dried tree, if fired, sets a whole forest on fire, so does a bad son destroy a whole family.
Chanakya
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
Stella Benson
I dedicate this aphorism to my relatives, just to let the world know that I had some.
Carl William Brown
Break up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity.
E. H. Chapin
The family is an absolute monarchy in miniature.
Abraham Miller
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
Two people who know they do not understand each other, Breeding children whom they do not understand And who will never understand them.
T. S. Eliot
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.
Charles Caleb Colton
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.
Benjamin Franklin
Where can a person be better than in the bosom of their family.
Marmontel Gretry
The many books I have at home, among other things, serve both to keep relatives away and to keep me away from them.
Carl William Brown
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
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Thomas Jefferson
If the family goes, so goes our civilization.
Ronald Reagan
I’m from such an old family, it’s been condemned.
Phyllis Diller
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
Anne Enright
In houses where, in place of that sacred, inmost flame of love, there is discord at the centre, the whole household becomes hypocritical.
William Makepeace Thackeray
That was what you did with family when you’d been worried about them, you grabbed them and held on to them and told them how much they’d pissed you off, and it was okay, because no matter how angry you got, they still belonged to you.
Cassandra Clare
The family was an art … and the dinner table was the place it found expression.
Don Delillo
I can’t wait to give my writing to my relatives; perhaps it will finally be a good opportunity for them to read a book.
Carl William Brown
When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire, to our sons, ambition. But, to our daughters, there is something which there are no words to express.
Joseph Addison
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other’s way, what a tangle.
John Updike
A family needs to work as a team, supporting each other’s individual aims and aspirations.
Buzz Aldrin
The government is becoming the family of last resort.
Jerry Brown
Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else.
Sarah Dessen
Go to friends for advice, woman for love, strangers for charity and relatives for nothing.
Spanish Proverb
What family has no mariner in its tree? No fool, no felon. No fisherman.
Cormac Mccarthy
In that family where the husband is pleased with his wife, and the wife with her husband, happiness will assuredly be lasting.
Brahma
An advantage of poverty, your relatives gain nothing by your death.
Hebrew Proverb
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. There’s a place in the garden for both of them.
Erma Bombeck
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
Andre Gide
What is family? They were the people who claimed you.
Sarah Dessen
The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended — and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.
Robert Frost
The rich never have to seek out their relatives.
Italian Proverb
None but a mule denies his family.
Arabian Proverb
All people are your relatives, therefore expect only trouble from them.
Chinese Proverb
Govern a family as you would cook a small fish – very gently.
Chinese Proverb
In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.
Chinese Proverb
Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.
Chinese Proverb
A small family is soon provided for.
English Proverb
A good son-in-law is like the acquisition of a new son; a bad one is like the loss of your daughter.
Jewish Proverb
Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.
Jewish Proverb
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.
Jewish Proverb
When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.
Jewish Proverb
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Thoughts and reflections on family and relatives
