Top 100 Family Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best family quotes ever written, picked out of the full family archive on QuoteForever. You will find Harbhajan Singh Yogi, Henny Youngman, Jimi Hendrix and John Adams among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

Dad taught me everything I know. Unfortunately, he didn't teach me everything he knows.

2

If the family goes, so goes our civilization.

3

A man should never neglect his family for business.

4

I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.

5

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

6

You have never by a word or a deed given me one moment's uneasiness; on the contrary I have felt perpetual gratitude to heaven forhaving given me, in you, a source of so much pure and unmixed happiness.

7

Peace, like charity, begins at home.

8

I am just happy to be part of the Nike family.

9

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

10

The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.

11

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once.

12

Possessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.

13

And when I've been away from my family and friends, I have felt good hearing some of those old songs.

14

My family was loving... they were very supportive and very affectionate, and basically I could do what I wanted, and basically it wasn't anything dangerous, thank God.

15

From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen.

16

A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

17

A married man with a family will do anything for money.

18

She said I do on day 482, and gave me a son on day 761.

19

Everyone feels like family and I am back in the city that I love.

20

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

21

My favorite room in the house is the living room. We have two big couches, six recliners and over 20 pillows. It's a really comfortable place to hang out with my family.

22

The things that make me happy most are my family and working.

23

I'm happy that I have my family, and I'm happy that I had Virginia, where I grew up, to retreat to any time I felt overwhelmed. Whenever there were times when I felt like the rug was being pulled out from under me and I was floating in this crazy space, I would stop and go back to that neighborhood and realize nothing's changed, really.

24

My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.

25

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

26

My parents are very hard working people who did everything they could for their children. I have two brothers and they worked dog hard to give us an education and provide us with the most comfortable life possible. My dad provided for his family daily. So, yes, that is definitely in my DNA.

27

I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won't be offended.

28

I am very proud of my mom and consider her the most courageous woman I know. With perseverance, sacrifice and hard work, she raised a family of Olympic athletes and gave us the tools and the spirit to succeed. That is something that my brothers and I will always be thankful for.

29

I come from a family of business people, but I had the idea I wanted to become an artist.

30

When you come from where I come from, if anyone in the family makes it out, the others kind of come with you.

31

Perhaps no American family-with the possible exception of the Adams family-has had a more vivid and powerful impact on the life of their times. But the Kennedy tale-the spiral compound of glory, achievement, degradation and almost mythical tragedy-exerts a fascination upon us that goes beyond their public achievements.

32

Lord, this humble house we'd keep Sweet with play and calm with sleep. Help us so that we may give Beauty to the lives we live. Let Thy love and let Thy grace Shine upon our dwelling place.

33

You ought to try surviving one of my family reunions. It's like having a bowling alley in your brain.

34

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

35

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

36

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.

37

We can choose our family. We can't choose our relatives.

38

Live every act fully, as if it were your last.

39

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

40

A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.

41

My family is my number one priority.

42

Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

43

There is good in everything; it's just how you choose to look at it. Everything that's worth it has a price. For me to be a model - I had to leave my family. Do you think I liked that? No! There are sacrifices. Life is meant to be a challenge, because challenges are what make you grow.

44

I think every chef, not just in America, but across the world, has a double-edged sword - two jackets, one that's driven, a self-confessed perfectionist, thoroughbred, hate incompetence and switch off the stove, take off the jacket and become a family man.

45

There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

46

Love is the ultimate state of human being where compassion prevails and kindness rules.

47

Do you know what love is? Love is an absolute power of self-totality. Love is not what you think love is. Love is a strength. Love is a goodness, like Godliness. There is no limit to it. There is no shortage in it. There is no bargaining in it.

48

Love without trust does not exist. Love is a strength of trust. Trust is the test of love. When you love, you trust each other. When you don't, you don't. Don't camouflage the word "love" and not trust each other.

49

God lives in cozy homes. Happiness, which a cozy home can give you, is so divine on this Earth, you don't need anything more than that. God is unseen but His creation is known and seen. What is known and seen for you, if you cannot relate to that how can you relate to the unknown? If you can relate knowingly to your unknown thought, you can always find happiness. But you have to have nerves for it. You have to have a mental capacity for it, you have to have trained yourself, and this is the part of that training I have come to share with you.

50

A cozy home is not just a sixty-five thousand dollar house bought from Bank of America. A cozy home is a total consciousness of the two individuals within the framework of the home, and in relationship to the entire surrounding of this planet and beyond this planet. God lives in cozy homes.

51

The fact is, if a person has not experienced the love of his or her soul, within one's self, there is no chance that that person can go out and love, even though it is a faculty of love that you most powerfully need.

52

If you do not love yourself to the depth of totality, you will never love love as a reality.

53

A family is not built just by marrying a woman and producing children. Family is built with a timeless sacrifice which must represent purity, unity, standard of ethics, righteousness, grace, dignity, divinity and principles.

54

Love means total interest; love means total creativity; love means total input. Who has that for you? Who has given you values? Who has given you character? Who has told you, "Stand for righteousness and I'll stand behind you"?

55

You have no sensitivity that your soul shall leave in the subtle body and that your subtle body is as sophisticated as anything in the universe can be. So unless you produce in yourself elegance, grace, sophisticatedness in your mind, manners and attitude, and unless you come from the infinite altitude, and ascend to that altitude, you cannot descend in love. The higher is your being, the deeper is the love.

56

If the entire divinity and domain of God sits in the heart of a person, and his longing becomes timeless, then man can develop the capacity to love.

57

Mostly your love is passionate force. But when this passionate force turns itself to be a compassionate force under the guidance of compassionate intelligence, that is where one becomes brahm giani. One knows all, one sees all, one says all.

58

What is a cozy home? Where you enter and you feel the radiance of your divine self.

59

Physical love must end up as a creative love. And creative love must end up as a divine love. And divine love must end up as a unison love. And unison love must become God Itself. These are the known stages of love.

60

The path which we believe in is the path of love; it has all the goodness of God in it-calmness and kindness.

61

People who love each other don't bargain. Love has no such thing as business. Love has no conditions, because love does not obey time and space.

62

A mother's love is like an island, In life's ocean vast and wide, A peaceful, quiet shelter, From the restless, rising tide.

63

My son complains about headaches. I tell him all the time, when you get out of bed, it's feet first!

64

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

65

My son is 21. He'll be 22 if I let him.

66

My mother is such an incredibly strong woman. She raised a family of five boys extremely well. She made us all strong, loving, caring people. We all support each other. I'm really thankful to her.

67

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

68

There is no cure for laziness but a large family helps.

69

If my father was the head of our house, my mother was its heart.

70

I like to live. I like to dance. I like to eat. I like to work and I like my family. I like to enjoy. And.. knock on wood.. it's nice that I can live this way.

71

Family is the root of all that is good in our lives, and I am so grateful for mine.

72

My family was Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a really tough religion. It kind of deterred me from religion for a long time. They still practice, but I don't. But I always remained spiritual, and had a belief that there is a God. I'm trying to find my way, you know?

73

If pain is truly love, for my family I die.

74

Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.

75

Papa didn't cuss, he didn't raise a whole lot of fuss. But when we did wrong, Papa beat the hell out of us.

76

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

77

When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

78

Unity must be of the mind and heart, a sense of belonging together and of facing together those who attack it.

79

The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren't even included in Darwin's famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hung's barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true.

80

Family makes a house a home.

81

When Amos Moses was a boy his daddy would use him for alligator bait, tie a rope around his neck and throw him in the swamp.

82

I don't come from a rich family - it's not like we lived in a cardboard box, but we didn't have a ton of money.

83

My wife is the boss at home, and my daughters are the bosses. I am just the worker. We are a very warm family and very happy.

84

Student: Sir, you said you must change the world. How can you change it, sir? Krishnamurti: What is the world? The world is where you live - your family, your friends, your neighbours. And your family, your friends, your neighbours can be extended and that is the world. Now, you are the centre of that world. That is the world you live in. Now how will you change the world? By changing yourself?

85

Click bang, what a hang, your daddy just shot poor me.

86

You may almost forget the smell of your family.

87

I'm up here in this womb, I'm looking all around. We'll, I'm looking out my belly button window and I see a whole lot of frowns.

88

Dictators can fix up their entire families in good jobs, in or around government, and often do. In democracies, such a practice is frowned upon. Privileged access to the corridors of power through family connections and a kind of old boys' network, is also deemed an abuse of power, and so it is.

89

A man's name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him...but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.

90

As long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families. As long as Marriage exists, Knowledge, Property and Influence will accumulate in Families.

91

Your Letters concerning Miss N. have given me as much Concern as they ought-not knowing the Character nor what to advise, but feeling all a Fathers Tenderness, longing to be at home that I might enquire and consider and take the Care I ought.

92

I am well pleased with what I hear of you: The principal Satisfaction I can expect in Life, in future will be in your good Behavior and that of my other Children. My Hopes from all of you are very agreable. God grant, I may not be disappointed.

93

You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

94

Being born into the Royal Family is like being born into a mental asylum. Marrying into it is not something to be taken lightly.

95

I'd love to have been born into a wealthy family. I might have turned out even more marvellous than I am now.

96

As I look back now on my coaching career, I think of my family, I think of the days that we spent together. I say this to coaches everywhere: If you ever have a chance to take your kids with you, take them. Don't miss that opportunity. Because when it's all over and done with, when you look back, those are going to be your fondest memories.

97

My mother was the center of the family.

98

The bloodline of Jesus is thicker, deeper, stronger than the bloodline of race, ethnicity and family.

99

Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'

100

My films are always concerned with family, friendship, honor, and patriotism.

More Family quotes

This is the short list. The full family quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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