Thoughts on families

By Forbes India

Published: Mar 18, 2017 06:48:52 AM IST

What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.
—Mother Teresa

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching—they are your family.
—Jim Butcher

The family—that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.
—Dodie Smith

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.
—Richard Bach

After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
—Oscar Wilde

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.
—Angela Schwindt

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant that 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 learnt in seven years.
—Mark Twain

I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.
—Ugo Betti

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Leo Tolstoy

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
—George Burns

Siblings: Children of the same parents, each of whom is perfectly normal until they get together.
—Sam Levenson

Image: Mother Teresa: John Downing / Getty Images; Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde: Getty Images; Dodie Smith: Sasha / Getty Images; George Burns: Fred Prouser / Reuters

(This story appears in the 30 November, -0001 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)