The greatest of all arts
is living together.
-William Lyon Phelps

Marriage is for your innermost being;
for the living essence of Truth
to have a place to express itself with another being.
-John de Ruiter

Marriage is the union of two souls
to live amicably together.
-B. K. S. Iyengar

Marriage is an experience in growth,
an adventure in maturing the inner life.
-Manly Hall

For "I" to become "we" and yet remain "I,"

is one of the greatest challenges of marriage.

-Nathaniel Branden

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality

by tearing down all boundaries;

on the contrary, a good marriage is one 

in which each partner appoints the other

to be the guardian of his solitude,

and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

A merging of two people is an impossibility,

and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in,

a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties

of their fullest freedom and development.

But once the realization is accepted 

that even between the closest people infinite solitude exists,

a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them,

if they succeed in loving the expanse between them,

which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other 

as a whole and before an immense sky.

-Rainer Maria Rilke 

Marriage is tough,
because it is woven of all these various elements,
the weak and the strong.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The curse which lies upon marriage
is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness
rather than in their strength -
each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving.
-Simone de Beauvoir

When children, we are sensualists; 

when in love, idealists.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every marriage is a battle between two families
struggling to reproduce themselves.
-Carl Whitaker

Remarriage, hence marriage, is,
whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking.
-Carolyn G. Heilbrun

The sum to which two married people owe to one another
defies calculation.
It is an infinite debt,
which can only be discharged through all eternity.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Marriage is a covered dish.
-Swiss Proverb

Courtship brings out the best.
Marriage brings out the rest.
-Cullen Hightower

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man
before you can find out the kind of wife he needs;
and usually it's the exact sort you are not.
-Willa Cather

If you want to know about a man
you can find out an awful lot by looking at who he married.
-Kirk Douglas

A woman must be a genius
to create a good husband.
-Honore de Balzac

A good marriage is like a good trade.
Each thinks he got the better deal.
-Ivern Ball

We cannot look to another human being
to complete our soul process.
The inner marriage is a divine marriage,
the outer marriage a human one.
-Marion Woodman

Marriage is a love poem,
but in prose.
-Robert Sabatier

When marrying, ask yourself this question:
Do you believe that you will be able
to converse well with this person into your old age?
Everything else in marriage is transitory.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Not that we were incompatible;
we just had nothing to talk about.
-Haruki Murakami

A happy marriage is a long conversation
that always seems too short.
-Andre Maurois

Marriage is one long conversation
chequered by disputes.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments
people feel passionately about.
-Katharine Hepburn

In married conversation, as in surgery,
the knife must be used with care.
-Andre Maurois

Married people should not be quick to hear
what is said by either when in ill humor.
-Samuel Richardson

The goal of marriage
is not to think alike, but to think together.
-Robert C. Dodds

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up.
-Odgen Nash

The greatest thing is family life
is to take a hint where a hint is intended -
and not to take a hint where a hint isn't intended.
-Robert Frost

Many marriages would be better
if the husband and the wife clearly understood
that they are on the same side.
-Zig Ziglar

The complaints which anyone voices against his mate
indicate exactly the qualities
which stimulated attraction before marriage.
-Rudolf Dreikurs

Husbands and wives generally understand
when opposition will be in vain.
-Jane Austen

The relationship between husband and wife
should be one of closest friends.
-B. R. Ambedkar

Marriage should be a duet -
when one sings, the other claps.
-Joe Murray

I once read that in any good marriage,
one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden.
We take it in turns to be either.
-Meryl Streep

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds -
they mature slowly.
-Peter de Vries

Such a large sweet fruit is a complete marriage,
that it needs a very long summer to ripen in
and then a long winter to mellow and season it.
-Theodore Parker

A perfect marriage
is a hearth and a horizon.
-Elizabeth Bibesco

The family is the "factory"
where people are made.
-Virginia Satir

Babies are such a nice way to start people.
-Don Herold

A babe is nothing but a bundle of possibilities.
-Henry Ward Beecher

What the mother sings to the cradle
goes all the way down to the coffin.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Then I became a mother and it just fills every space,
that isn't filled with something else important.
It's just like this incredible balloon that blows up and fills life up.
-Thandie Newton

Children reinvent your world for you.
-Susan Sarandon

Parenthood remains
the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
-Alvin Toffler

The most important question in the world is,
'Why is the child crying?'
-Alice Walker

A baby is born with a need to be loved -
and he never outgrows it.
-Frank H. Clark

Those that do teach young babes,
Do it with gentle means and easy tasks.
-William Shakespeare

The most effective kind of education
is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
-Plato

The mother's heart
is the child's schoolroom.
-Henry Ward Beecher

The heart of a a mother is a deep abyss
at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-Honore de Balzac

A mother is not a person to lean on
but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher

If you want a baby, have a new one.
Don't baby the old one.
-Jessamyn West

For when a child is born
the mother also is born again.
-Gilbert Parker

The most important thing
a father can do for his children
is to love their mother.
-Theodore Hesburgh

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

 It is a wise father that knows his own child.
-William Shakespeare

It doesn't matter who my father was;

it matters who I remember he was.

-Ann Sexton

I know you're no worse than most men
but I thought you were better.
I never saw you as a man.
I saw you as my father.
-Arthur Miller

You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be
what they feel they cannot themselves be,
but I tell you it also works the other way.
-Sherwood Anderson

When you teach your son,
you teach your son's son.
-The Talmud

No man stands taller
than when he stoops to help a child.
-Attributed to Abraham Lincoln

Brothers and sisters
are as close as hands and feet.
-Vietnamese Proverb

Childhood is a short season.
-Helen Hayes

Every year, when you're a child,
you become a different person.

-Alice Munro

A child is an uncut diamond.
-Austin O'Malley

Parents are patterns.
-Tom Fuller

Children are like wet cement.
Whatever falls on them makes an impression.
-Haim Ginott

Children are not things to be moulded,
but are people to be unfolded.
-Jess Lair

A gentle person knows
that true growth requires nurture not force.
-Henri Nouwen

Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims;
to love him is to bring out the best in him,
to teach him to love what is difficult.
-Nadia Boulanger

Respect the child.
Be not too much his parent.
Trespass not on his solitude.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The voice of parents is the voice of gods,
for to the children they are heaven's lieutenants.
-William Shakespeare

The most influential of all educational factors
is the conversation in a child's home.
-William Temple

Don't limit a child to your own learning,
for he was born in another time.
-Rabindranath Tagore

Children have more need of models
than of critics.
-Joseph Joubert

Children are likely to live up
to what you believe of them.
-Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson

Don't try to make your children grow up to be like you,
or they may do it.
-Russell Baker

If there is anything we wish to change in a child,
we should first examine it and see whether it is not something
that could better be changed in ourselves.
-Carl Jung

Live so when your children think of fairness and integrity,
they think of you.
-H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Every day of our lives
we make deposits in the memory banks
of our children.
-Charles R. Swindoll

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically
on their environment and especially on their children
than the unlived life of the parent.
-Carl Jung

The child endures all things.

-Maria Montessori

It is not a bad thing.
that children should occasionally, and politely,
put their parents in their place.
-Colette

You can learn many things from children.
How much patience you have, for instance.
-Franklin P. Jones

You must not expect old heads
on young shoulders.
-English Proverb

What an elder sees sitting,
the young can't see standing.
-Nigerian Proverb

What a child doesn't receive
he can seldom later give.
-P.D. James

The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.
-John Milton

There is often a good deal of child
left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
-Willa Cather

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life
that he has a raging desire to go somewhere
and dig for hidden treasure.
-Samuel Clemens, "Mark Twain"

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations;
he is only trying on one face after another
to find a face of his own.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

Don't hold your parents up to contempt.
After all, you are their son,
and it is just possible that you may take after them.
-Evelyn Waugh

The best thing you can give your children,
next to good habits, are good memories.
-Sydney J. Harris

The most important thing
that parents can teach their children
is how to get along without them.
-Frank A. Clark

There are only two lasting bequests
we can give to our children.
One of these is roots, the other, wings.
-Hodding Carter II

The more intensely the family
has stamped its character upon the child,
the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again
in the bigger world of adult life.
-Carl Jung

All the time a person is a child
he is both a child and learning to be a parent.
After he becomes a parent
he becomes predominantly a parent reliving his childhood.
-Benjamin Spock

We never know the love of the parent
until we become parents ourselves.
-Henry Ward Beecher

It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god
but a man to you,
when he comes down from the mountain
and you see he's this man with weaknesses.
And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead.
-Robin Williams

It is not until you become a mother
that your judgement slowly turns
to compassion and understanding.
-Erma Bombeck

I would say that compassion for our parents
is the true sign of maturity.
-Anais Nin

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do.
Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust
over the lives of little children.
-Alex Hailey

Grandparents make the world...
a little softer, a little kinder, a little warmer.
-Anonymous

Everyone needs to have access
both to grandparents and grandchildren
to become a full human being.
-Margaret Mead

The whole business of marshaling one's energies
becomes more and more important as one grows older.
-Hume Cronyn

One thing about getting older
is that we don't lose all the other ages we've been.
-Madeline L'Engle

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

There are no individuals in the world,
only fragments of families.
-Carl Whitaker

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

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

All happy families resemble each other,
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-Leo Tolstoy

I know why families were created,
with all their imperfections.
They humanize you.
-Anais Nin

A family is the place
where principles are hammered and honed
on the anvil of daily living.
-Charles R. Swindoll

Family is what grounds you.
-Angelina Jolie

The family is an initiation into human maturity.
-Manly Hall

The family is the test of integrity.
-Manly Hall

The family is a living entity.
-Manly Hall

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-George Santayana

The family is the first essential cell
of human society.
-Pope John Paul XXIII

The family is the nucleus of civilization.
-Will Durant

As the family goes, so goes the nation
and so goes the whole world in which we live.
-Pope John Paul II

The whole world is my family.
-Pope John Paul XXIII

The whole world is one family.
-Sun Yat-sen

I don't want to just love my family;
I want to love all of humanity.
-Alejandro Jodorowsky

Make the family of man
your family as well.
-Edgar Cayce

When you are part of a group, living for others,
you broaden yourself.
This really is family life.
-Prajnanpad

[What can we do to promote world peace?]
Go home and love your family.
-Mother Teresa