All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy
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You certainly didn’t ask for them, and you can’t trade ’em, but they’re the ones who know you best.
They’re the ones who cherish you, and whom you should cherish in return – whether they’re your biological family or otherwise.
Even though it’s easy to forget at times, family is the most important thing in the world.
This could mean your mother, your father, your siblings, your spouse, your grandparents, your aunts, your uncles, your cousins, your in-laws. For some, “family” simply those with whom we share unconditional love.
Of course, families are complicated. These deep relationships can carry lots of baggage and hurt as well. Given their importance in our loves, it’s no wonder people throughout history are fascinated with the intricacies of familial love.
So no matter how you feel about them, hopefully these quotes about family will help you love and appreciate them no matter how close you are.
Family Quotes
“Family is a life jacket in the stormy sea of life.” – J.K. Rowling
“Family is not an important thing, it’s everything.” – Michael J. Fox
“Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.” – David Ogden Stiers
“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” – Mother Teresa
“Family is more than blood.” – Cassandra Clare
“Family and friends are hidden treasures, seek them and enjoy their riches.” – Wanda Hope Carter
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” – Desmond Tutu
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.” – Anthony Brandt
“A man should never neglect his family for business.” – Walt Disney
“Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.” – Lilo & Stitch
“Having somewhere to go is home. Having someone to love is family. Having both is a blessing.” – Unknown
“Family is one of nature’s masterpieces.” – George Santayana
“No man has ever lived that had enough of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.” – William Butler Yeats
“Family is the most important thing in the world.” – Princess Diana
“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” – Vito Corleone, The Godfather
“At the end of the day, a loving family should find everything forgivable.” – Mark V. Olsen
“There’s nothing that makes you more insane than family.” – Jim Butcher
“Siblings: children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they got together.” – Sam Levenson
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.” – George Moore
“When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching – they are your family. ” – Jim Butcher
“The most important thing in the world is family and love.” – John Wooden
“Family: where life begins and love never ends.” – Unknown
“Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of man, the victory of just cause, the triumph of truth.” – Menacheim Begin
“Families are like fudge – mostly sweet with a few nuts.” – Unknown
“Being a family means you are a part of something very wonderful. It means you will love and be loved for the rest of your life.” – Lisa Weed
“Nothing is better than going home to family and eating good food and relaxing.” – Irina Shayk
“Being a family means you are a part of something very wonderful. It means you will love and be loved for the rest of your life.” – Unknown
“In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy
“Govern a family as you would cook a small fish – very gently.” – Chinese Proverb
“Spare the rod and spoil the child – that is true. But, beside the rod, keep an apple to give him when he has done well.” – Martin Luther
“God is the designer of the family.” – Gordon B. Hinckley
“One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.” – Jonathan Foer
“To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.” – Barbara Bush
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” – 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
“I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.” – Barbara Bush
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” – Richard Bach
“A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.” – Pat Conroy
“Families are the compass that guides us. They are the inspiration to reach great heights, and our comfort when we occasionally falter.” – Brad Henry
“My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family.” – Siri Hustvedt
“Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home.” – Anthony Liccione
“In every conceivable manner, the family is a link to our past, bridge to our future.” – Alex Haley
“Families are like branches on a tree. We grow in different directions yet our roots remain as one.” – Unknown
“Home should be an anchor, a port in a storm, a refuge, a happy place in which to dwell, a place where we are loved and where we can love.” – Marvin J. Ashton
“There’s only one thing more precious than our time and that’s who we spend it on.” – Leo Christopher
“My family comes first. Maybe that’s what makes me different from other guys.” – Bobby Darin
“The memories we make with our family are everything.” – Candace Cameron Bure
“It’s all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.” – Philip Green
“Family is family.” – Linda Linney
“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain
“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” – George Burns
“To understand your parents’ love, you must raise children yourself.” – Chinese Proverb
“Being part of a family means smiling for photos.” – Harry Morgan
“Family ties mean that no matter how much you might want to run from your family, you can’t!” – Unknown
“Is this what family is like: the feeling that everyone’s connected, that with one piece missing, the whole thing’s broken?” – Trenton Lee Stewart
“Writers will happen in the best of families.” – Rita Mae Brown
“We must take care of our families wherever we find them.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
“One’s family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I’ll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who’ll be with me will be my family.” – Robert Byrd
“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
“The family is the first essential cell of human society.” – Pope John XXIII
“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
“There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.” – Jerry Seinfeld
“My family is my life, and everything else comes second as far as what’s important to me.” – Michael Imperioli
“Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones that would do anything to see you smile and who love you no matter what.” – Unknown
“Stick to the basics, hold on to your family and friends – they will never go out of fashion.” – Niki Taylor
“The family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.” – Dodie Smith
“It didn’t matter how big our house was; it mattered that there was love in it.” – Peter Buffett
“I sustain myself with the love of family.” – Maya Angelou
“When trouble comes, it’s your family that supports you.” – Guy Lafleur
“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.” – Arundhati Roy
“Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.” – Andre Maurois
“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.” – Confucius
“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” – Mary Karr
“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.” – G.K. Chesterton
“Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.” – John C. Maxwell
“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.” – Winston Churchill
“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” – Marge Kennedy
“So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty.” – Haniel Long
“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.” – Mitch Albom
“A family doesn’t have to perfect; it just needs to be united.” – Unknown
“That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.” – Deb Caletti
“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
“Home is where you are loved the most and act the worst.” – Marjorie Pay Hinckley
“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.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn’t a social construct but an instinct.” – Jodi Picoult
“Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!” – Albert Einstein
“Cherish your human connections – your relationships with friends and family.” – Barbara Bush
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.” – Oscar Wilde
“No one’s family is normal. Normalcy is a lie invented by advertising agencies to make the rest of us feel inferior.”– Calire LaZebnik
“When all the dust is settled and all the crowds are gone, the things that matter are faith, family, and friends.” – Barbara Bush
“Sticking with your family is what makes it a family.” – Mitch Albom
“You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.” – Elizabeth Berg
“The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.” – Lee Iacocca
“In time of test, family is best.” – Burmese Proverb
“The world, we’d discovered, doesn’t love you like your family loves you.” – Louis Zamperini
“All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family – it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.” – Douglas Coupland
“Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family.” – Peter Pearsall
“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.” – C.S. Lewis
“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
“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“There’s nothing I value more than the closeness of friends and family, a smile as I pass someone on the street.” – Willie Stargell
“A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no awe, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.” – Agatha Christie
Whether your family lives close, or thousands of miles away, they are the ones you can turn to when times get tough. Celebrate your amazing bond and show your appreciation for them today! Is your favorite family quote missing? Let us know in the comments.
*This post was originally published on June 17th, 2013 and updated on March 31st, 2020.
Quincy is KIM's lead editor and content writer, and has invested in online properties since 2009. Quincy holds an MBA from the University of Dundee and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and lives in San Antonio with his wife Natalie and his dog Oban. When not working on KIM, he enjoys traveling, poker, and anything related to crypto.
Wow, that is the article which push me to comment. Best quotes best. keep it up
i love this!!