When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
—Sophia Loren (b.1934) Italian Actor
Let your children go if you want to keep them.
—Malcolm S. Forbes (1919–1990) American Publisher, Businessperson
Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.
—H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (b.1940) American Self-Help Author
Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher
Love well, whip well.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
Children need guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
—Anne Sullivan Macy (1866–1936) American Educator
Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.
—Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) British Actor, Playwright, Director
The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, and that’s what parents were created for.
—Ogden Nash (1902–71) American Writer of Sophisticated Light Verse
The trouble with parents is that by the time they are experienced, they are unemployed.
—Indian Proverb
We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves. When we first bend over the cradle of our own child, God throws back the temple door, and reveals to us the sacredness and mystery of a father’s and a mother’s love to ourselves.—And in later years, when these have gone from us, there is always a certain sorrow, that we cannot tell them we have found it out.—One of the deepest experiences of a noble nature in reference to the loved ones that have passed beyond this world, is the thought of what he might have been to them, and done for them, if he had known, while they were living, what he has learned since they died.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.
—John Locke (1632–1704) English Philosopher, Physician
If you want a baby, have a new one. Don’t baby the old one.
—Jessamyn West
Parents can plant magic in a child’s mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.
—Robert MacNeil (1931–2024) Canadian News Anchor
The question that is so clearly in many potential parents minds: “Why should we stunt our ambitions and impoverish our lives in order to be insulted and looked down upon in our old age?”
—Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) Austrian-American Political Economist, Sociologist
The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
—Benjamin Spock (1903–98) American Pediatrician, Author
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
When I was a young man, I didn’t think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don’t need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–94 ) American First Lady
Maternity is a matter of fact; paternity is a matter of opinion.
—U.S. Proverb
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
—Samuel Butler
You have to love your children unselfishly. That is hard. But it is the only way.
—Barbara Bush (1925–2018) American First Lady
How many hopes and fears, how many ardent wishes and anxious apprehensions are twisted together in the threads that connect the parent with the child!
—Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–1860) American Publisher, Writer
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
—Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) French Poet, Adventurer
If your children look up to you, you’ve made a success of life’s biggest job.
—Unknown
The first and finest lesson that parents can teach their children is faith and courage.
—Smiley Blanton
From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?
—Juvenal (c.60–c.136 CE) Roman Poet
A Prayer For My Son: Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) American Military Leader
A child, like your stomach, doesn’t need all you can afford to give it.
—Frank A. Clark
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