Any woodsman can tell you that in a broken and sundered nest, one can hardly find more than a precious few whole eggs. So it is with the family.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
Occasionally we all inherit, or are given, or get something or some things that are too good to use for a variety of seemingly sound but really quite silly reasons-they’re heirlooms or too rare or too expensive or too fragile or too pretty. The result is heirloom linen handed down from generation to generation that falls apart when some benighted heiress decides to air it. While I’m glad that past generations saved some things we now enjoy, we are enjoying them by using them instead of carefully storing them for our kids-in turn to store. Unused beautiful things are a waste.
—Malcolm S. Forbes (1919–1990) American Publisher, Businessperson
In a houseful of toddlers and pets, you can start out having a bad day, but you keep getting detoured.
—Robert Brault
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
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
I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
Cautiously avoid speaking of the domestic affairs either of yourself, or of other people. Yours are nothing to them but tedious gossip; and theirs are nothing to you.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
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
Writers will happen in the best of families.
—Rita Mae Brown (b.1944) American Writer, Feminist
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
Noble fathers have noble children.
—Euripides (480–406 BCE) Ancient Greek Dramatist
Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
They… threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this – animated, but collateral.
—Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) English Novelist, Essayist
A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
The family is a haven in a heartless world.
—Christopher Lasch (1932–94) American Historian, Moralist, Social Critic
If you would reform the world from its errors and vices, begin by enlisting the mothers.
—Charles Simmons (1924–2017) American Editor, Novelist
Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.
—Napoleon I (1769–1821) Emperor of France
Heredity: An omnibus in which all our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
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 ties of family and of country were never intended to circumscribe the soul.—If allowed to become exclusive, engrossing, clannish, so as to shut out the general claims of the human race, the highest end of Providence is frustrated, and home, instead of being the nursery, becomes the grave of the heart.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
—Samuel Butler
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
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
A father is a banker provided by nature.
—French Proverb
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 (1874–1963) American Poet
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 Scripture in the Christian Faith
You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder when they have done that they do not delight in your company.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
A mother’s heart is always with her children.
—Common Proverb
Mules are always boasting that their ancestors were horses.
—German Proverb