There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
No person ever died that had a family.
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
I have very few friends. I have a handful of close friends, and I have my family, and I haven’t known life to be any happier.
I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.
I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
He that raises a large Family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand, as Watts says, a broader Mark for Sorrow; but then he stands a broader Mark for Pleasure too.