My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.
Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.
A "good" family, it seems, is one that used to be better.
The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants.
God knows the feelings in every human heart. He can soften sorrow and lead when there seems to be no light. Prayer can give guidance and confidence. It reminds us that no one need be alone in this world. If all else fails, remember, God and one other person can be a family.
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.
We are each other's business: We are each other's magnitude and bond.
I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other - I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.
As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.
There's no vocabulary: 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.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to 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.
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.
There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals - or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?
The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfilment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.
The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.
Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.
