Family sayings

“I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich.”
- Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, "Identity Crisis," M*A*S*H


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


“The family is a haven in a heartless world.”
- Attributed to Christopher Lasch


“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


“Families are like fudge... mostly sweet with a few nuts.”
- Author Unknown


“If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.”
- Ashleigh Brilliant


“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


“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


“A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.”
- Ogden Nash


“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


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


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


“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, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


“You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them.”
- Desmond Tutu


“An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.”
- Spanish Proverb


“Blood's thicker than water, and when one's in trouble
Best to seek out a relative's open arms.”
- Author Unknown


“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, 1813


“To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.”
- Barbara Bush


“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


“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


“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


“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


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


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


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


“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, The Day I Became an Autodidact


“In time of test, family is best.”
- Burmese Proverb


“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


“The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family.”
- Lee Iacocca


“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


“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


“At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable.”
- Mark V. Olsen and Will Sheffer, Big Love, "Easter"


“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


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


“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”
- George Santayana, The Life of Reason


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


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


“There's an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.”
- Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


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


“Are we not like two volumes of one book?”
- Marceline Desbordes


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


“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