A happy family is but an earlier Heaven. – John Bowring
It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons. – Johann Schiller
The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. – Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact
The family is a haven in a heartless world. – Christopher Lasch
A family vacation is one where you arrive with five bags, four kids and seven I-thought-you-packed-it’s. – Ivern Ball
Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. – Bernard Shaw, Everybody’s Political What’s What?
Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts. – Author Unknown
The family fireside is the best of schools. – Arnold H. Glasow
My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived and let me watch him do it. – Clarence Budington Kelland
If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion. – Ashleigh Brilliant
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands. – Anne Frank
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains
as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. – Shirley Abbott
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. – George Herbert
To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there. – Barbara Bush
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. – George Bernard Shaw
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
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
Family: A social unit where the father is concerned with parking space, the children with outer space, and the mother with closet space. – Evan Esar
Before most people start boasting about their family tree, they usually do a good pruning job. – O.A. Battista
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold. – Ogden Nash
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. – Helen Keller
Oh, to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am. – Rebecca Richards
The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together. – Erma Bombeck
Making the decision to have a child – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. – Elizabeth Stone
When you look at your life, the greatest happiness’s are family happiness’s. – Joyce Brothers
The house does not rest upon the ground, but upon a woman. – Mexican Proverb
Home is the first refuge from – and last defense against – the disappointments and the terrors of life. – Dean Koontz in “Frankenstein Book 2: City of Night”
In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry. – Margaret Laurence
Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. – Paul Pearshall
Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers. – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness. – Nancy Mitford
Other things may change us, but we start and end with family. – Anthony Brandt
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
– Thomas Jefferson
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained. – Winston Churchill
The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to. – Dodie Smith
The great gift of family life is to be intimately acquainted with people you might never even introduce yourself to, had life not done it for you. – Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact
In time of test, family is best. – Burmese Proverb
Family is just accident…. They don’t mean to get on your nerves. They don’t even mean to be your family, they just are. – Marsha Norman
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family. – Lee Iacocca
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
What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories. – George Eliot
At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable. – Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, Big Love, “Easter”
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable – each segment distinct. – Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst. – Marge Kennedy
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason
We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break. – Marquise de S’vign’
Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family. – Anthony Brandt
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future. – Gail Lumet Buckley
Are we not like two volumes of one book? – Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
When she woke briefly during her last illness and found all her family around her bedside: “Am I dying or is this my birthday?” – Lady Nancy Astor
I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap. – Fred Allen
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
Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.
-Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. – Desmond Tutu
An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship. – Spanish Proverb
Blood’s thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble,
Best to seek out a relative’s open arms. – Author Unknown
The happiness of the domestic fireside is the first boon of Heaven; and it is well it is so, since it is that which is the lot of the mass of mankind. – Thomas Jefferson
A collection of beautiful words from similarly interesting people. Great list – Thanks for the post.
Sometimes we forget just how good out families are 🙂
Johnny, Sad, but true! An occasional reminder always helps.
And most of the time, we neglect the importance of our family. How sad but true.
Aybi, I think most of us tend to take the things we love the most for granted. An occasional reminder is usually all it takes to make us realize just how precious our loved ones really are!!!