“The home is the empire!” said Cicero, two thousand years ago. “There is no peace more delightful than one’s own fireplace.” “He is happiest who finds peace in his own home,” wrote Goethe centuries later.

----------
Lillian Eichler Watson

• To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.

Samuel Johnson 

• When the one man loves the one woman and the one woman loves the one man, the very angels leave heaven and come and sit in that house and sing for joy.

Brahma 

• ‘Tis better to have loved and lost,

  than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Tennyson 

• Talk never of wasted affection, affection never was wasted,

  If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning

  Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;

  That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

• Two persons who love each other are in a place more holy than the interior of church.

William Lyon Phelps 

• It was a wise man who said that it is important not to pick the right mate but to be the right mate. And contrary to many popular love stories, it is not during the first year of bliss that most dangers crop up. Marriages do not, like dropped chinaware, smash as a result of that first quarrel which the newly married hope is unthinkable. Marriage is a rooted thing, a growing and flowering thing that must be tended faithfully.

Donald Culross Peattie 

• The highest happiness on earth is in marriage. Every man who is happily married is a successful man even if he has failed in everything.

William Lyon Phelps 

• At the end only two things really matter to a man. …The affection and understanding of his family.

Richard E. Byrd 

• Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we except the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle. …

  Give us courage, gaiety, and the quit mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one another. Amen.

Roberts Louis Stevenson 

• The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Will Durant 

• The ideal, which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in which she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to her. Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.

Henri F. Amiel 

• Home is where the heart is.

Pliny 

• Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.

Douglas Jerrold 

• He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds his peace in his home.

Johann von Goethe 

• The happiest holidays are those people “go home” for. Going home may mean youngsters returning from school or job, sometimes bringing their own younger youngsters with them. It may mean going to “Grandma-and-Grandpa’s.” Home is where father and mother are, or where one of them was brought up. Home is a dreamland in which every effort is made to spoil children. Home is the fond memory held by parents of the days when they themselves were very young. Home is where the year’s troubles and anxieties are forgotten. Home is where no unkind word is spoken, and where the good smells from the kitchen tell of deep affection. Home binds together the relatives by blood and the relatives by marriage and turns them into that most beautiful of human institutions-the family.

  If trains are late or crowded, if plains can’t get off, if Mother is worn out with packing and Father weary after his pre-holiday hours in the office, if many little things go wrong, who cares? When one is going home a bit of hardship on the way makes the arrival a greater joy. The tree is lighted and waiting. The old folks are at the door, their faces beaming with pure welcome. The day’s mirth does not hide its tenderness. The laughter comes closer that that of other days to the laughter of angels; the joke is on those who maintain that it does not come natural to human beings to love one another.

  Many who are elderly today remember such holidays from long ago, when jingling sleight-bells were more familiar than automobile horns. Many who are now children will remember this day long years from now. The mechanisms of living change, the world changes, but the sweetness of family reunions, the bliss of “going home”-this abides.

New York Times, December 25, 1948