Quotations about Family II

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


The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness. ~Nancy Mitford


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


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


Friends are God's apology for relations. ~Hugh Kingsmill


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


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 Sévigné


Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family. ~Anthony Brandt


There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

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


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