100 Family Quotes

We all have families. It’s one of the few things that all people have in common—no matter what our race, ethnicity, religion, gender, etc.

Then, we all grow up to have families of our own in one form or another. For some of us, our pets are our family members, too. : ) (See, e.g., “100 Dog Quotes” and “100 Cat Quotes.”)

Although the families we create for ourselves as adults can never replace our original families or all the intense memories, happy and sad, that our first families helped make for us, our chosen families are more special precisely because we chose them.

If your family is making you miserable, then, as an adult, you finally have the power to create and protect your own happiness. You have choices. You have rights. You have the duty to take care of your own mental, emotional, and physical health— especially if you have very young children. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you or otherwise make you feel depressed. (And, if you don’t know how to make them stop, see, e.g., “Cuckoo in Your Nest!” or “Help with Overcoming Codependency.”)

Don’t be afraid to let go of anyone who causes you harm, including close relations. Many have done it. (See, e.g., “Celebrities with Estranged Parents.”) Your only chance at happiness in this world is to free yourself from toxic people, especially toxic family members. When you finally clear these people out of your life, you make space for truly loving, positive, supportive people to slowly wander into your world.

We all deserve to be happy! If you already have a great family, that’s wonderful and something to never take for granted! It’s only been a little over two and a half years since I finally found my dream family. I can’t recommend it enough! Don’t settle for anything less than a loving, positive, supportive family. Life is too short for anything less! I’d rather be all alone in the world than stuck with a toxic family. The funny thing is that I had to actually choose that lonely route before I was ready to receive anything better. At last, I finally know what true happiness is! : )

100 QUOTES ABOUT FAMILY

1. 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

2. In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient’s condition. Usually this is a member of the family.
- Alfred Adler

3. I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.
- Fred Allen

4. The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.
- Richard Bach

5. Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.
- Francis Bacon

6. We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.
- Henry Ward Beecher

7. 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

8. Good family life is never an accident but always an achievement by those who share it.
- James H. S. Bossard

9. A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
- John Bowring

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

11. If you don’t believe in ghosts, you’ve never been to a family reunion.
- Ashleigh Brilliant

12. Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
- Van Wyck Brooks

13. When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses.
- Joyce Brothers

14. Writers will happen in the best of families.
- Rita Mae Brown

15. 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

16. Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.
- Gail Lumet Buckley

17. Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
- George Burns

18. In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.
- Eva Burrows

19. The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

20. 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

21. Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl—no superior alternative has yet been found.
- Winston Churchill

22. Twenty thousand years ago the family was the social unit. Now the social unit has become the world, in which it may truthfully be said that each person’s welfare affects that of every other.
- Arthur C. Compton

23. The father who does not teach his son his duties is equally guilty with the son who neglects them.
- Confucius

24. Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there’s always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.
- Marcelene Cox

25. We cannot destroy kindred: our chains stretch a little sometimes, but they never break.
- Marquise de Sévigné

26. Are we not like two volumes of one book?
- Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

27. Family is the most important thing in the world.
- Princess Diana

28. Whatever they grow up to be, they are still our children; and, the one most important of all the things we can give to them is unconditional love. Not a love that depends on anything at all except that they are our children.
- Rosaleen Dickson

29. No success in public life can compensate for failure in the home.
- Benjamin Disrali

30. The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
- Duke of Windsor

31. Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and, one day, faithfully hand it on to your children.
- Albert Einstein

32. 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

33. Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters, and of family disagreements.
- Elizabeth II

34. 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

35. 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

36. 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

37. I could not point to any need in childhood as strong as that for a father’s protection.
- Sigmund Freud

38. Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
- Matt Groening

39. Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.
- Sidonie Gruenberg

40. If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

41. 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

42. In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
- Alex Haley

43. Families are the compass that guide us. They are the inspiration to reach great heights, and our comfort when we occasionally falter.
- Brad Henry

44. One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.
- George Herbert

45. The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
- Theodore Hesburgh

46. There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

47. 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

48. Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
- Ed Howe

49. No matter what you’ve done for yourself or for humanity, if you can’t look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?
- Elbert Hubbard

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

51. 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

52. It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.
- Pope John XXIII

53. I believe the only people that should be around a child and raising a child are people who absolutely, 100 percent, love that child.
- Angelina Jolie

54. But we survived, and we’re a good family. I just don’t want to dedicate one more tear, or watch my mother cry one more time.
- Angelina Jolie

55. A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.
- Helen Keller

56. The informality of family life is a blessed condition that allows us to become our best while looking our worst.
- Marge Kennedy

57. Friends are God’s apology for relations.
- Hugh Kingsmill

58. The family you come from isn’t as important as the family you’re going to have.
- Ring Lardner

59. The family is a haven in a heartless world.
- Christopher Lasch

60. In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.
- Margaret Laurence

61. 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

62. There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.
- Mignon McLaughlin

63. 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

64. 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.
- Margaret Mead

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

66. A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.
- George Moore

67. Family life is full of major and minor crises—the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce—and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.
- Thomas Moore

68. Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
- Martin Mull

69. I am years gone from my family and miles away … but they raid by telephone with jarring suddenness; they have the cyclic constancy of a mortgage; and, they are inevitable and relentless, like the erosion of my remaining youth. Like certain frightening dreams, my family returns.
- Jerrold Mundis

70. In each family a story is playing itself out; and, each family’s story embodies its hope and despair.
- Auguste Napier

71. Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore;
And, that’s what parents were created for.
- Ogden Nash

72. 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.
- Reinhold Niebuhr

73. Science has established two facts meaningful for human welfare: first, the foundation of the structure of human personality is laid down in early childhood; and, second, the chief engineer in charge of this construction is the family.
- Meyer Francis Nimkoff

74. I know why families were created with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.
- Anais Nin

75. 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

76. At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable.
- Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer

77. We are one big family of people, trying to make our way through the unfolding puzzle of life.
- Sara Paddison

78. To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of others.
- Pope John Paul II

79. I think people that have a brother or sister don’t realize how lucky they are. Sure, they fight a lot; but, to know that there’s always somebody there, somebody that’s family.
- Trey Parker

80. 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

81. He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care.
- William Penn

82. 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

83. Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.
- Jim Rohn

84. 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.
- Isaac Rosenfeld

85. Peace, like charity, begins at home.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

86. The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.
- George Santayana

87. Bringing up a family should be an adventure, not an anxious discipline in which everybody is constantly graded for performance.
- Milton R. Saperstein

88. 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 nurturing family.
- Virginia Satir

89. It is not flesh and blood, but the heart, which makes us fathers and sons.
- Johann Schiller

90. 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

91. If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
- George Bernard Shaw

92. Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
- George Bernard Shaw

93. The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
- Dodie Smith

94. Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart walking around outside your body.
- Elizabeth Stone

95. Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
- Charles R. Swindoll

96. You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around—and why his parents will always wave back.
- William D. Tammeus

97. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
- Leo Tolstoy

98. My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got.
- Mark Twain

99. My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person: he believed in me.
- Jim Valvano

100. I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.
- Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford

CONCLUSION

In the American Heritage Dictionary, the secondary definition of family is “[t]wo or more people who share goals and values, have long-term commitments to one another, and reside usually in the same dwelling place.” That’s me and my boyfriend in a nutshell. Our family is the source of all my strength and happiness. So, I’m eternally grateful! And, I wish for all of you similar—or even greater—happiness! : )

[Note: More family quotes in the comments section below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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[For “300 Friendship Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Forgiveness Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Love and Marriage Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Interesting Quotes by Women,” click here.]

[For “100 Health Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Existence Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Happiness Quotes,” click here.]

[For “125 Sarcastic Quotes,” click here.]

[For all posts about different QUOTES, click here.]

[For “25 Statements to Happiness,” click here.]

[For “30 Statements for Great Relationships,” click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with People,” click here.]