The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

Confucius

He that has no fools, knaves, nor beggars in his family, was begot by a flash of lightning.

Thomas Fuller, MD


The family is the school of duties... founded on love.

Felix Adler


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


Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible--the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nuturing family.

Virginia Satir

Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.

Denzel Washington

The family is more sacred than the state.

Pope Pius XI


Govern a family as you would cook a small fish - very gently.

Chinese Proverb

...Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is...like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

G. K. Chesterton, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family" (1906)


As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty "One Writer's Beginnings"


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

A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family's love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can iritate you more than any group of people in the world.

Andre Maurois,  The Art of Living

Even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

John Bowring

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

George Bernard Shaw