Archive

Quotes

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

—Rebecca West, 1959

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

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, 1919

It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

—Friedrich Schiller, 1781

One race there is of men, one of gods, but from one mother we both draw our breath.

—Pindar, c. 450 BC

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

—Albert Camus, 1942

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.

—Robert Frost, 1939

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

—Pope John Paul II, 1986

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, 1786

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

—H.L. Mencken, 1919

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1954