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
What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?
—Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) American Novelist
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 (1881–1958) English Novelist, Essayist
A mother’s heart is always with her children.
—Common Proverb
A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
—Chuck Swindoll (b.1934) American Evangelical Christian Pastor, Author
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 (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
Family is the most important thing in the world.
—Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–97) English Royal, Humanitarian, Peace Activist
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
—Nancy Mitford (1904–73) English Novelist, Biographer
If you would reform the world from its errors and vices, begin by enlisting the mothers.
—Charles Simmons (1924–2017) American Editor, Novelist
It is not flesh and blood but the heart, which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German Poet, Dramatist
It’s not easy to find your own way when you believe that you need love, approval, appreciation, or anything from your family. It’s particularly hard when you want them to see things your way.
—Byron Katie (b.1942) American Speaker, Author
In a houseful of toddlers and pets, you can start out having a bad day, but you keep getting detoured.
—Robert Brault
How the mother is to be pitied who hath handsome daughters! Locks, bolts, bars, and lectures of morality are nothing to them: they break through them all. They have as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards.
—John Gay (1685–1732) English Poet, Dramatist
I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
The parents age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.
—Confucius (551–479 BCE) Chinese Philosopher
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
The hatred of relatives is the most violent.
—Tacitus (56–117) Roman Orator, Historian
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.
—Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995) American Philanthropist, Socialite
The babe at first feeds upon the mother’s bosom, but is always on her heart.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by 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 (1896–1940) American Novelist
Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.
—German Proverb
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
The scholar without good breeding is a nitpicker; the philosopher a cynic; the soldier a brute and everyone else disagreeable.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
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
The family is the nucleus of civilization.
—William C. Durant (1861–1947) American Industrialist
It isn’t success if it costs you the companionship and chumminess and love of your children. Very often busy, wealthy men of momentous affairs discover too late that they have sacrificed the finest thing in life, the affection of their family. Let me relate an incident (containing) a priceless suggestion for many ultra-busy businessmen. Frank L. Baker, prominent public utility executive, told a friend that he was going to give his young son an unusual Christmas present. I am going to write my boy a letter telling him I am going to give him an hour of my time every day. Alas, Mr. Baker died two weeks later.
—B. C. Forbes (1880–1954) Scottish-born American Journalist, Publisher
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people—no mere father and mother—as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American Novelist, Human Rights Activist
Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that.
—J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) Scottish Novelist, Dramatist
The best way to make your spouse and children feel secure is not with big deposits in bank accounts, but with little deposits of thoughtfulness and affection in the “love account”.
—Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American Author
He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he that has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.
—William Penn (1644–1718) American Entrepreneur, Political leader, Philosopher
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
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
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 (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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 (1865–1939) Irish Poet, Dramatist
That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
The voice of parents is the voice of gods, for to their children they are heaven’s lieutenants.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
To a father waxing old nothing is dearer than a daughter.—Sons have spirits of higher pitch, but less inclined to sweet, endearing fondness.
—Euripides (480–406 BCE) Ancient Greek Dramatist
Everything is ideal to its parent.
—Sophocles (495–405 BCE) Ancient Greek Dramatist
The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.
—Confucius (551–479 BCE) Chinese Philosopher
Family life is a bit like a runny peach pie – not perfect but who’s complaining?
—Robert Brault
With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) English Novelist, Painter, Critic
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 fulfillment 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 (1805–72) Italian Patriot, Political Leader
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 (1799–1888) American Teacher, Writer, Philosopher
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 (1709–84) British Essayist
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
—George Burns (1896–1996) American Comedian
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 (1830–94) English Poet, Hymn Writer
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass.” “We’re not raising grass,” my dad would reply, “we’re raising boys.”
—Harmon Killebrew (1936–2011) American Baseball Player