“If I had to preach a sermon on the family I would take for my text this phrase of Paul Valery's: "In every family there is concealed a specific interior boredom which causes its members to escape and live their own lives. There is also in every family an ancient and powerful force which manifests itself when the group is gathered in the dining-room for its evening meal, when its members feel free to be completely themselves.”

— André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If I had to preach a sermon on the family I would take for my text this phrase of Paul Valery's: "In every family there…" by André Maurois?

André Maurois 202

French writer 1885–1967

Related quotes

“Every Mexican family has a member that fought in the Revolution…There are stories in my family of two great uncles who fought on different sides and they would meet at my uncle’s land to share a meal and then they’d go back to the fight…The Revolution…it divided families.”

Nao Bustamante (1969) American artist

On the familial toll of the Mexican Revolution in “Femininity in Kevlar: Nao Bustamante’s women of the Mexican Revolution” https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-artist-nao-bustamante-women-of-the-mexican-revolution-20150513-column.html in Los Angeles Times (2015 May 14)

“There are no lebensunwertes leben--no "lives unworthy of life." Every member of the human family bears profound, inherent and equal dignity.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/920123964982284293 (16 October 2017)
2017

“So often, the family that is intent on trying to “rescue” one of its members from something doesn't see how it is the family itself that has created and re-enforced the susceptibility and vulnerability to the very thing that they are intent on rescuing that member from.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“People frequently ask why my canvases are compartmentalized. No one ever asks this about a house. A man with a large family would not choose to live in a one-room house... I am like a man with a large family and must have many rooms. The children of my imagination occupy the various compartments of my painting, each independent and occupying its own place. At the same time they have the proper atmosphere in which to function together, in harmony and as a unified group. One can say that my paintings are like a house, in which each occupant has a room of his own.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Arts and Architecture, vol. 68, no 9, September 1951, p. 21.
1950s

“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Margaret Sanger book Woman and the New Race

Source: Woman and the New Race, (1922), Chapter 5, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families."
Context: Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months. This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members.