quotations
Search
   HOME | AUTHOR INDEX | SUBJECT INDEX | LINKS | USE OUR QUOTATIONS | CONTRIBUTE QUOTES | FORUM
Quotation of the day
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Daily Quote:
"Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life." (Congreve, William - Joy)

rss 2.0
Subscribe
Unsubscribe
Send the Quote of the Day to a friend
Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
Click here to see/listen to the equivalent proverb in:




Browse Quotations about Family

A brother is a friend provided by nature.
A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. [Proverbs 18:19]
A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another.
A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.
A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone.
A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative.
A man ought to live so that everybody knows he is a Christian... and most of all, his family ought to know.
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.
A small family is soon provided for.
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
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.
Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.
All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.
All people are your relatives, therefore expect only trouble from them.
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
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?
Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.
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.
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.
Cruel is the strife of brothers.
Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.
Family is the most important thing in the world.
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
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.
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.
Family... the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
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.
Govern a family as you would cook a small fish -- very gently.
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?
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
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.
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
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.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.
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.
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.
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.
I think the ideal situation for a family is to be completely incestuous.
I would rather start a family than finish one.
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.
In a broken nest there are few whole eggs.
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.
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family.
Look for the good, not the evil, in the conduct of members of the family.
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.
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.
Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head.
My family begins with me, your family ends with you.
Never did I think that I became family entertainment.
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.
None but a mule denies his family.
Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home.
Of all my wife's relations I like myself the best.
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.
One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fiber of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardily.
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.
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.
Our relatives are ours by chance, but we can choose our friends.
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.
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.
People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace.
Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.
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.
Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.
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.
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.
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom, but it is always on her heart.
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.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-- <