Family Quotes

“Becoming responsible adults is no longer a matter of whether children hang up there pajamas or put dirty towels in the hamper, but whether they care about themselves and others — and whether they see everyday chores as related to how we treat this planet.” Eda LeShan

 

“Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.” Elizabeth II

 

“In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.” Alex Haley

 

“The family is the nucleus of civilization.” Ariel and Will Durant

 

“In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family’s story embodies its hope and despair.” Auguste Napier

 

“The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.” Bertrand Russell

 

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” Carl Sandburg

 

“It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.” Colette

 

“Making the decision to have a child - it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.” Elizabeth Stone

 

“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

 

“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

 

“He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” Francis Bacon

 

“Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.” Francis Bacon

 

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” George Bernard Shaw

 

“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.” George Bernard Shaw

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” George Burns

 

“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” George Santayana

 

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.” Harry S Truman

 

“A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.” Helen Keller

 

“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

 

“Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.” Jessamyn West

 

“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

 

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Leo Tolstoy

 

“No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.” Margaret Mead

 

“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

 

“The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.” Theodore Hesburgh

 

“The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.” Thomas Jefferson

 

“Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible — the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.” Virginia Satir

 

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.” William Shakespeare

 

“To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.” Marilyn French

 

“Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.” Michael Levine

 

“I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.” Pearl S. Buck

 

“The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven’s lieutenants.” Shakespeare

 

“Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.” Sidonie Gruenberg