My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Quotes
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
—Jane Austen, 1815My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.
—Pindar, c. 450 BCMen are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
—Mark Twain, c. 1900Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
—Albert Camus, 1942Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
—August Strindberg, 1886He 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, 1786A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977The 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, 1919