Relationships and Family

A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don’t like her daughter to resemble her in.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?"

There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!

Do not let any sweet-talking woman beguile your good sense / with the fascinations of her shape. It’s your barn she’s after.

When once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, / The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless thy win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

That child whose mother has never smiled upon him is worthy neither of the table of the gods nor the couch of the goddesses.

High people, Sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.

Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors'.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.

Happy the man who, far away from business, like the race of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay.

Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.

Hell, Madame, is to love no longer.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

That's the nature of women not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved. W.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

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.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.