153 Family Quotes and Who Said Them

Before writing this, we read eleven of the family and sister quote lists that rank on Google. None of them links a quote to the place it was said or written, and the same mistakes travel from list to list. The page in first place credits one line to Friedrich Nietzsche in one section and to Eva Burrows in another. Reader's Digest tells readers a fact-checker verified its sourcing, then links nothing. Another list gives "Home is where the heart is" to Pliny the Elder, a credit nobody has ever traced to a page of Pliny.

So every quote below links to its source, or to the research that traces it, and where the version that circulates differs from the original, you get the original. Lines we could not trace to the person whose name is on them are left out of the lists, and the most common ones are explained in the misattribution table. We also left out the movie lines and song lyrics that most of the ranking lists include.

What is the most famous family quote?

Tolstoy's opening line. It turns up on many of the ranking lists, and it works because it is half a joke: happiness is generic, misery is specific.

• "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878, the first sentence of the novel in Constance Garnett's 1901 translation. Other translators word it slightly differently.

The other line that comes closest is Dodie Smith's toast from her 1938 play Dear Octopus, below. It is the source of calling your family "the dear octopus."

Famous quotes about family

The lines that turn up most often, traced back to the book or speech they came from.

• "To the family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to." Dodie Smith, Dear Octopus, 1938, a toast at a golden wedding. The printed play has a dash after "family."
• "You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them." Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream, 2004. The same passage is in his 1994 collection of speeches, The Rainbow People of God.
• "Having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family; especially if they live in another city." George Burns, Dr. Burns' Prescription for Happiness, 1984, item 1 in a list headed "Happiness is:"
• "The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born." G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905, chapter XIV
• "Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house." Barbara Bush, commencement address at Wellesley College, June 1, 1990
• "At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent." Barbara Bush, the same Wellesley speech, 1990
• "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, Family: The Ties That Bind... and Gag!, 1987. Gift books often move it into the present tense.
• "Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them." Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891, chapter V. Two years later he gave a sharper version to a character in a play: "Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
• "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." George Bernard Shaw, preface to Immaturity, 1930, a novel he wrote in 1879 and did not publish until 1930
• "The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family." Lee Iacocca, Talking Straight, 1988
• "As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live." Pope John Paul II, homily at a Mass for families in Perth, Australia, November 30, 1986
• "Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do." Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1979
• "My sons, if you are of one mind, and unite to assist each other, you will be as this faggot, uninjured by all the attempts of your enemies; but if you are divided among yourselves, you will be broken as easily as these sticks." Aesop, "The Father and His Sons," in George Fyler Townsend's 1867 translation. The "faggot" is the bundle of sticks the father asks each son to break.
• "Filial piety and fraternal submission! - are they not the root of all benevolent actions?" Youzi, a disciple of Confucius, The Analects, Book I, in James Legge's translation. Lists usually credit Confucius, but the Analects gives this line to his student.

Short family quotes

For a caption, a card, or a line under a family portrait. Each runs about a dozen words or fewer.

• "The family is one of nature's masterpieces." George Santayana, Reason in Society, 1905, the topic sentence of a paragraph on the family
• "The Family is the Country of the heart." Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man, 1860, the first sentence of the chapter "Duties to the Family"
• "A happy family / Is but an earlier heaven." John Bowring, the hymn "Home Joys," 1837. Often credited to George Bernard Shaw, who did not write it.
• "A little more than kin, and less than kind." William Shakespeare, Hamlet, around 1600, Hamlet's aside about his uncle and new stepfather
• "Smile at each other, make time for each other in your family." Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, 1979, her advice to a group of visiting American professors
• "I do think that families are the most beautiful things in all the world!" Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1869, Jo in the final chapter
• "There is no place like home." L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900, Dorothy to the Scarecrow in chapter IV
• "Friends are the family we choose for ourselves." Edna Buchanan, Suitable for Framing, 1995, a thought of the narrator in her mystery novel
• "It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home." Edgar A. Guest, "Home," in A Heap o' Livin', 1916, the line that opens and closes the poem
• "Mothers are the best lovers in the world." Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1869, Jo confiding in her mother in chapter 42
• "Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children." Sam Levenson, in print as his by April 1961, and often credited to Erma Bombeck, who said she saw it on a bumper sticker

Quotes about what makes a family

Lines about chosen family, adopted family and the people who become family without sharing a surname.

• "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, Families, 1978, her reported tour of dozens of American families
• "The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof." Richard Bach, Illusions, 1977, from the "Messiah's Handbook" in the novel
• "I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you've been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables." L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 1908, Marilla to the orphan she took in, chapter XXXVII
• "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi, Ruth 1:16, King James Version. It is read at weddings, but it is a widow choosing her late husband's family.
• "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother." Jesus, Mark 3:35, King James Version
• "God setteth the solitary in families." Psalm 68:6, King James Version, a verse often quoted at adoptions, usually in a modern translation
• "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in." Robert Frost, "The Death of the Hired Man," North of Boston, 1914. In the poem the wife answers that home is "Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

Quotes about home

The most borrowed line about home is John Howard Payne's "there's no place like home," written for an 1823 opera and echoed by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Both are below.

• "'Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, / Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." John Howard Payne, "Home, Sweet Home," from the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan, first performed in London in 1823
• "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986
• "For there we loved, and where we love is home, / Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts." Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., "Homesick in Heaven," 1872
• "The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family." Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Willis, April 18, 1790. "Past" is his spelling.
• "The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it." Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Domestic Life," Society and Solitude, 1870
• "There is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it." Homer, The Odyssey, Book IX, in Samuel Butler's 1900 translation, Odysseus explaining why he turned down a home with Calypso
• "No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful." L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900. "Be it ever so beautiful" is a nod to Payne's song.

Sister quotes

The best-known sister quote is Christina Rossetti's "there is no friend like a sister," from Goblin Market (1862). Several newer favorites come from 1990s books about sisters, and we name the person behind each one.

• "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." Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 1862, the closing lines, where Laura, grown up with children of her own, tells the little ones how her sister saved her
• "If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate." Jane Austen's mother, as recorded in J. E. Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870. The sisters shared a bedroom until Jane's death.
• "I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family." Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868, Jo on hearing that a tutor wants to marry her older sister
• "Four sisters, parted for an hour, / None lost, one only gone before, / Made by love's immortal power, / Nearest and dearest evermore." Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1869, from Jo's poem "In the Garret," written after Beth dies
• "Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone." Charlotte Brontë, of her sister Emily, in the 1850 "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell," reprinted in Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë
• "Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other." Carol Saline, Sisters, 1994, a book of interviews with photographs by Sharon J. Wohlmuth
• "Having a sister is like having a best friend you can't get rid of. You know whatever you do, they'll still be there." Amy Li, in Barbara Alpert's anthology No Friend Like a Sister, 1996. She is not a famous author: the book introduces her as a woman who runs a design firm with her sister.
• "A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost." Marion C. Garretty, In Praise and Celebration of Sisters, 1998, a Helen Exley gift book she wrote many short lines for
• "Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship." Margaret Mead, as quoted in Elizabeth Fishel's Sisters, 1979. We could not find it in Mead's own writing, so this is the earliest printing.

Brother quotes

Two of the most quoted brother lines are not about siblings at all: Shakespeare's "band of brothers" is a king speaking to his soldiers, and "a brother is a friend given by nature" is spoken by Cain over Abel's body. The notes say which is which.

• "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother." William Shakespeare, Henry V, around 1599. The king is speaking to his soldiers before Agincourt, so these brothers are comrades, not siblings.
• "We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another." William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, around 1594, the last lines of the play, spoken by one reunited twin to the other
• "Un frère est un ami donné par la nature." ("A brother is a friend given by nature.") Gabriel-Marie Legouvé, La Mort d'Abel, 1793. In the play it is Cain who says it, standing over the brother he has just killed.
• "From the time we were little children my brother Orville and myself lived together, played together, worked together and, in fact, thought together." Wilbur Wright, quoted in the National Park Service handbook Wright Brothers National Memorial, 1961. He died in 1912; the handbook does not say when or where he wrote it.
• "His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy / Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame." George Eliot, "Brother and Sister," sonnet X, written 1869, about her childhood with her brother Isaac

Sibling quotes

Jane Austen and Charles Lamb wrote some of the most honest lines about growing up with brothers and sisters, including Lamb's admission of "occasional bickerings."

• "Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connexions can supply." Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814, on Fanny Price and her sailor brother William, chapter 24
• "We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations." Charles Lamb, "Mackery End, in Hertfordshire," Essays of Elia, 1821. He calls her his cousin Bridget, but she was his sister Mary, who kept house with him most of his adult life.
• "I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is; neither would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and everyway consistent kinsman breathing." Charles Lamb, "My Relations," Essays of Elia, 1821, about his "cousin James," really his older brother John
• "I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too." William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, around 1601, Viola, who believes her twin brother has drowned
• "But were another childhood-world my share, / I would be born a little sister there." George Eliot, "Brother and Sister," sonnet XI, written 1869, the last lines of the sequence. Her brother had cut off contact in 1857 and did not write to her again until 1880.

Quotes about cousins

Shakespeare's best cousins are Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, raised together at court.

• "Never two ladies loved as they do." William Shakespeare, As You Like It, around 1599, Charles the wrestler describing Rosalind and her cousin Celia, "ever from their cradles bred together"
• "Whose loves / Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters." William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Le Beau on the same two cousins
• "We still have slept together, / Rose at an instant, learned, played, ate together, / And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans, / Still we went coupled and inseparable." William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Celia defending Rosalind to her father, who has just banished her
• "But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire." Charles Lamb, "Mackery End, in Hertfordshire," 1821, on turning up unannounced at the farm of country cousins he had never met
• "I care more for my cousins than for my ear-rings, so I promise, and I'll keep my word." Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins, 1875, Rose, trading her earrings for her cousin's promise not to smoke
• "Play I was a little sister. I know I'm silly, but perhaps I'm better than nothing, and I'd dearly love to do it." Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins, 1875, Rose to a cousin who wishes he had a sister. He answers: "I'm proud to have you for a sister."

Grandparent quotes

For more on what grandchildren end up calling them, see our list of grandma and grandpa names.

• "Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being." Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter, 1972, her memoir. She was largely schooled at home by her grandmother.
• "The closest friends I have made all through life have been people who also grew up close to a loved and loving grandmother or grandfather." Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter, 1972, the end of the chapter "On Being a Granddaughter"
• "For little children in particular, nobody on earth can do what grandparents can do. Grandparents kind of sprinkle Stardust over the lives of little children." Alex Haley, a talk at Brown University, May 26, 1984, printed in the Brown Alumni Monthly, about his grandparents in Henning, Tennessee
• "Now I am convinced my proper niche is being a grandmother, I fit into it so completely, and enjoy it so thoroughly! ... There is no fun for old people like it!" Hannah Whitall Smith, letter to her friends, February 7, 1889, written on her 57th birthday about her first grandchild
• "i want to tell you about my granfarther he is the best earl you ever new" Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1886, a letter written by a seven-year-old, spelling and all

Quotes about parents and children

Kahlil Gibran's "On Children" (1923) opens this list. It entered the US public domain in 2019, so you can print it in full.

• "Your children are not your children. / They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. / They come through you but not from you, / And though they are with you yet they belong not to you." Kahlil Gibran, "On Children," The Prophet, 1923
• "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth." Kahlil Gibran, the same poem
• "Oh, there is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son, that transcends all other affections of the heart." Washington Irving, "The Widow and Her Son," The Sketch Book, 1819
• "It is a wise father that knows his own child." William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, around 1597. A joke in the play: Launcelot is teasing his nearly blind father, who doesn't recognize him.
• "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!" William Shakespeare, King Lear, around 1606, Lear cursing his daughter Goneril
• "One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters." George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs, 1640. Herbert collected proverbs rather than coining them.
• "A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings." Hodding Carter, Where Main Street Meets the River, 1953. He credited an unnamed woman, not himself, and it is not Goethe's.

Funny family quotes

Oscar Wilde has more lines in this section than anyone else, all from his plays, with Ogden Nash and Mark Twain close behind.

• "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die." Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Algernon in Act I
• "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his." Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895, Algernon again
• "After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations." Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, 1893, Lady Caroline in Act II. It makes a good holiday-dinner caption.
• "One would be in less danger / From the wiles of the stranger / If one's own kin and kith / Were more fun to be with." Ogden Nash, "Family Court", the whole poem, first collected in Hard Lines (1931). Many web copies print "a stranger."
• "Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, / And that's what parents were created for." Ogden Nash, "The Parent," in The Face Is Familiar, 1940, the whole poem
• "Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don't they will make you." Mark Twain, "Advice to Youth," a talk from about 1882, printed in Mark Twain's Speeches
• "Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething." Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894, a chapter epigraph
• "CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth." Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
• "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Mr. Bennet, the original deadpan dad
• "In America there are two classes of travel, first class, and with children." Robert Benchley, "Kiddie-Kar Travel," Pluck and Luck, 1925
• "Men who have a thirty-six-televised-football-games-a-week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated." Erma Bombeck, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, 1973. The "brain dead" version on most lists is a later rewording.
• "Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties." G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905, who adds that the family is "like a little kingdom," and "generally in a state of something resembling anarchy"
• "Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done." Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1889, from the chapter where Uncle Podger hangs a picture
• "She sprang it on me before breakfast. There in seven words you have a complete character sketch of my Aunt Agatha." P. G. Wodehouse, "Extricating Young Gussie," 1915, the opening of the first Jeeves story

Christmas family quotes

Charles Dickens supplies half the lines in this section, and he modeled his early Christmas writing on Washington Irving's 1820 Sketch Book essays. For card wording to go with them, see our Christmas card messages.

• "A Christmas family-party! We know nothing in nature more delightful! There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discords are forgotten." Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Dinner," Sketches by Boz, first printed in a London weekly on December 27, 1835, eight years before A Christmas Carol
• "Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through (as it ought), and that the prejudices and passions which deform our better nature, were never called into action among those to whom they should ever be strangers!" Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Dinner," 1835
• "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843, Scrooge in Stave Four
• "There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843, at the party at Scrooge's nephew's
• "It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843, just before the family's game of blind-man's buff
• "Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!" Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837, chapter XXVIII
• "The season for kindling not merely the fire of hospitality in the hall, but the genial flame of charity in the heart." Washington Irving, "Christmas," The Sketch Book, 1820
• "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868, the first line of the novel
• "Christmas is not a time or a season, but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas." Calvin Coolidge, Christmas message to the American people, December 25, 1927. Many lists misquote it as "nor a season."
• "Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred and we are better thruout the year for having in spirit become a child again at Christmas-time." Laura Ingalls Wilder, Missouri Ruralist column, December 1924, her last as a regular writer for the paper. "Thruout" is how it was printed.
• "There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child." Erma Bombeck, syndicated column, December 22, 1967
• "Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love!" Hamilton Wright Mabie, "Christmas Eve," My Study Fire, 1890, about a family hiding presents from each other

Family time and memories quotes

• "Between the dark and the daylight, / When the night is beginning to lower, / Comes a pause in the day's occupations, / That is known as the Children's Hour." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Children's Hour," 1860
• "Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with." Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897, a chapter epigraph
• "The old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday!" Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837, chapter XXVIII
• "The idea of home, fraught with the fragrance of home-dwelling joys, reanimates the drooping spirit." Washington Irving, "Christmas," The Sketch Book, 1820
• "We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it." George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860, Book First, chapter V

Family reunion quotes

Dodie Smith's "dear octopus" toast, in the famous quotes above, was written for a golden wedding with four generations at the table, so it may be the best reunion toast on this page.

• "How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill." Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, 1837
• "It is an annual gathering of all the accessible members of the family, young or old, rich or poor; and all the children look forward to it, for two months beforehand, in a fever of anticipation." Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Dinner," 1835
• "This festival ... has been made the season for gathering together of family connections, and drawing closer again those bands of kindred hearts which the cares and pleasures and sorrows of the world are continually operating to cast loose." Washington Irving, "Christmas," The Sketch Book, 1820
• "Abusua te se nfwiren, egugu akuw-akuw." ("Family names are like flowers, they blossom in clusters.") Ashanti proverb from Ghana, R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs, 1916, No. 471

For a reunion banner, Psalm 133:1 ("how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity") is in the Bible verses below.

Bible verses about family

All in the King James Version, which is in the public domain, with links to the full passage. Several verses people know best are modern translations, and where the familiar wording differs, the note says so.

Home and household

• "As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD." Joshua, Joshua 24:15, the last clause of his farewell speech to the tribes of Israel, and the form on most plaques
• "Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established: And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches." Proverbs 24:3-4. "House" means the household as well as the building.
• "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Genesis 2:24
• "And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken." Ecclesiastes 4:12. The "cord of three strands" read at weddings is the NIV wording.
• "And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." Jesus, Mark 3:25. Abraham Lincoln drew on it for his 1858 "House Divided" speech.
• "But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel." Paul, 1 Timothy 5:8, on families looking after their own elderly relatives

Parents and children

• "Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward." Psalm 127:3. "A gift from the LORD" is the NLT wording.
• "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6
• "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee." The Fifth Commandment, Exodus 20:12
• "And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." Paul, Ephesians 6:4, right after he tells children to obey their parents
• "And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." Moses, Deuteronomy 6:7, just after the Shema
• "My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother." Proverbs 1:8, the opening appeal of Proverbs, which gives the mother's teaching equal weight
• "Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her." Proverbs 31:28, from the "virtuous woman" poem, a Mother's Day favorite
• "I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth." 3 John 1:4. The writer means spiritual children, but parents have long borrowed it.

Brothers, sisters and the generations

• "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" Psalm 133:1
• "A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." Proverbs 17:17
• "There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother." Proverbs 18:24
• "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain, Genesis 4:9. Usually quoted as a call to look out for each other, but it is Cain dodging God's question right after he has killed Abel.
• "Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of children are their fathers." Proverbs 17:6, the grandparents verse. "Children's children" is the KJV's word for grandchildren.
• "Yea, thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon Israel." Psalm 128:6
• "The unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice." Paul to Timothy, 2 Timothy 1:5, the only grandmother named in the New Testament
• "But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children." Psalm 103:17
• "And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age." The angel Gabriel to Mary, Luke 1:36. Modern translations say "relative."

Love and forgiveness at home

• "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:4. "Love is patient, love is kind" is the modern NIV wording of the same verse.
• "Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye." Paul, Colossians 3:13, just before his instructions to households
• "And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins." Peter, 1 Peter 4:8. Modern versions turn "charity" into "love."

Ruth's "whither thou goest, I will go," Mark 3:35 and Psalm 68:6 are in the section on what makes a family, above.

Proverbs about family from around the world

Taken from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections that printed each proverb in its own language with an English translation.

• "Ost und West, daheim das Best." ("East or west, home is best.") German proverb, Henry G. Bohn, A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs, 1857. The Dutch have it too: "Oost, west, t'huis best."
• "Casa mia, casa mia, per piccina che tu sia, tu mi sembri una badìa." ("Home, dear home, small as thou art, to me thou art a palace.") Italian proverb, Bohn, 1857. "Badìa" is literally an abbey.
• "Ein Vater ernährt eher zehn Kinder, denn zehn Kinder einen Vater." ("A father maintains ten children better than ten children one father.") German proverb, Bohn, 1857
• "Hvo der tager Barnet ved Haanden tager Moderen ved Hjertet." ("He who takes the child by the hand, takes the mother by the heart.") Danish proverb, Bohn, 1857
• "Van vader komt eere, van moeder gemak." ("From the father comes honour, from the mother comfort.") Dutch proverb, Bohn, 1857
• "Amor de padre, que todo lo otro es aire." ("A father's love, for all other is air.") Spanish proverb, Bohn, 1857
• "God Nabo er bedre end Broder i anden By." ("A good neighbour is better than a brother far off.") Danish proverb, Bohn, 1857. The Danish says "a brother in another town."
• "The family is an army, and your own mother's child is your real kinsman." Ashanti proverb from Ghana, Rattray, Ashanti Proverbs, 1916, No. 472. Ashanti descent is traced through the mother.
• "Abusua dua, wontwa." ("The family tree is not cut.") Ashanti proverb, Rattray, 1916, No. 473
• "When your mother is poor, you do not leave her and go and make some one else your mother." Ashanti proverb, Rattray, 1916, No. 488
• "Everything prospers in a united family; though events do not happen according to men's calculations." Chinese proverb, William Scarborough, A Collection of Chinese Proverbs, 1875, No. 391
• "When father and son agree, the family will not fail; when brothers agree, the family will not separate." Chinese proverb, Scarborough, 1875, No. 2126
• "A man's mother is his other God." Swahili proverb, W. E. Taylor, African Aphorisms, 1891, No. 343
• "The beetle is a beauty in the eyes of its mother." Egyptian Arabic proverb, John Lewis Burckhardt, Arabic Proverbs, 1830, No. 60. In Cairo the beetle stood for ugliness.
• "Better a little relationship than much acquaintance." Irish proverb, T. F. O'Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs, 1922, No. 118

For the images families have used to say the same things, from family trees to coats of arms, see our guide to symbols of family.

Where does "blood is thicker than water" come from?

It is older than English. The earliest known relative is in the German beast epic Reinhart Fuchs, from around 1180: "kin-blood is not spoiled by water." The English form is in print in a 1652 sermon by William Jenkyn, "Blood is thicker (we say) then water," and his "we say" shows it was already a common saying (Wikipedia summarizes the sources).

Scottish writers loved it. It appears in John Moore's novel Zeluco in 1789, and in Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), where Dandie Dinmont, after a relative's will is read out, says "Weel, blude's thicker than water; she's welcome to the cheeses and the hams just the same." Alexander Hislop's Proverbs of Scotland (1862) lists it as "Bluid's thicker than water." In 1859 a US Navy commodore, Josiah Tattnall, used it to explain why he had helped a British squadron under fire in China, despite American neutrality.

You may have seen the claim that the "original" saying was "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," meaning the opposite. That wording first shows up in the 1990s and 2000s, from writers who gave no source. When H. Clay Trumbull wrote a whole book on blood covenants in 1885, he quoted the proverb only as the ordinary Western saying about kin: "We, in the West, are accustomed to say, that 'blood is thicker than water'; but the Arabs have the idea that blood is thicker than milk."

Which famous family quotes are misattributed?

The lines in this table are real and widely shared, but the name or the source usually printed with them is wrong. Each correction links to the research that settles it.

Each correction links to the scan, archive or research it rests on.

Family captions for photos

Written for this page, so they carry no name. Short enough to sit under a photo. If you are still planning the picture, our list of family photo ideas covers poses and settings.

• Same people, new year, same couch.
• Nobody blinked. We have the proof.
• This took eleven tries and one bribe.
• Loud house, full table, no complaints.
• All of us, finally in one place.
• The kids are taller. The jokes are not new.
• Three generations, one group chat.
• Home is wherever we're all squeezed in together.
• Before the pie, after the argument about the pie.
• Our favorite people, in no particular order.
• Proof we can all be still for five seconds.
• The whole crew, plus the dog who thinks he's in charge.

What can you write on a family portrait?

Something you can read from across a room: the family name, the year, and a line under ten words. From the sourced lists above, Santayana's "The family is one of nature's masterpieces," Mazzini's "The Family is the Country of the heart," Bowring's "A happy family is but an earlier heaven" and Payne's "There's no place like home" all trim cleanly. A card tucked behind the frame, or a note on the back, gives you room for something longer. Or use one of ours:

• All of us, all together.
• Where our story starts.
• Ours, always.
• The best thing we ever made.
• Love lives here.
• Home is us.

A painted portrait is the other half of the inscription. Our custom family portrait turns one photo of two to six people into a picture in an art style you choose, such as stained glass or a storybook painting.

Frequently asked questions