1. A brother is a friend provided by nature. ~Legouve Pere
2. A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living. ~charles Swindoll
3. A father is someone who carries pictures in his wallet where his money used to be. ~Unknown
4. A happy family is but an earlier heaven. ~John Bowring
5. An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship. ~Spanish Proverb
6. As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live. ~Pope John Paul II
7. Blood's thicker than water, and when one's in trouble best to seek out a relative's open arms. ~Unknown
8. 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
9. Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. ~Charles R. Swindoll
10. Families are like fudge... mostly sweet with a few nuts. ~Unknown
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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
14. For love within a family, love that's lived in
But not looked at, love within the light of which
All else is seen, the love within which
All other love finds speech.
This love is silent. ~T. S. Eliot
15. Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. ~Martin Mull
16. Having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night is a very old human need. ~Margaret Mead
17. 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
18. I am convinced that if we as a society work diligently in every other area of life and neglect the family, it would be analogous to straightening deck chairs on the Titanic. ~Stephen Covey
19. I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich. ~Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford
20. If mamma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. ~Unknown
21. If we are serious about renewing fatherhood, we must be serious about renewing marriage. . . . Healthy marriages are not always possible. But we must remember, they are incredibly important for children. Our hearts know this and our nation must recognize this. None of us is perfect. And so no marriage and no family is perfect. After all, we all are human. Yet, we need fathers and families precisely because we are human. We all live, it is said, in the shelter of one another. And our urgent hope is one of the oldest hopes of humanity, to turn the hearts of children toward their parents, and the hearts of parents toward their young. ~George W Bush, June 7, 2001
22. 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
23. In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future. ~Alex Haley
24. It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons. ~Johann Schiller
25. One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world. ~Unknown
26. Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes. ~Chinese Proverb
27. Some Things We Keep
I grew up in the forties and fifties with practical parents - a Mother who washed aluminum foil after she cooked in it, then reused it. A Father who was happier getting old shoes fixed than buying new ones. Their marriage was good, their dreams focused. I can see them now, Dad in trousers, tee shirt and a hat and Mom in a house dress, lawn mower in one hand, dishtowel in the other. It was the time for fixing things - a curtain rod, the kitchen radio, screen door, the oven door, the hem in a dress. Things we keep. It was a way of life, and sometimes it made me crazy. All that re-fixing, reheating, renewing, I wanted just once to be
wasteful. Waste meant affluence. Throwing things away meant there'd always be more. But then my Mother died, and on that clear summer's night, in the warmth of the hospital room, I was struck with the pain of learning that sometimes there isn't any 'more'. Sometimes, what we care about most gets all used up and goes away.....never to return. So, while we have it, it's best we love it and care for it..... and fix it when it's broken.....and heal it when it's sick. This is true for old cars..... and children with bad report cards.....and dogs with bad hips.....and aging parents .....and grandparents...and marriage. We keep them because they are worth it, because we are worth it. Some things we keep. ~Unknown
28. 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
29. The family is one of nature's masterpieces. ~George Santayana
30. The family is the school of duties... founded on love. ~Felix Adler
31. The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have. ~Ring Lardner
32. The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to. ~Dodie Smith
33. 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
34. The love of a family is life's greatest blessing. ~Unknown
35. The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. ~Theodore Hesburgh
36. The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. ~Confucius
37. 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
38. To understand your parents' love, you must raise children yourself. ~Chinese proverb
39. To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there. ~Barbara Bush
40. Treat your family like friends and your friends like family. ~Proverb
41. 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
42. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. ~Mark Twain
43. When you look at your life, the greatest happinesses are family happinesses. ~Joyce Brothers
44. You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. ~Frederick Buechner
45. You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them. ~Desmond Tutu