A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.
A mother is not a person to lean on but person to make leaning unnecessary.
A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.
Children need guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
Do they know they're old, these two who are my father and my mother whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?
Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.
Don't set your wit against a child.
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise… specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?
Having children makes one no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.
He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death. [Exodus 21:17]
He that does not bring up his son to some honest calling and employment, brings him up to be a thief.
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!
How selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go.
I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
I don't know any parents that look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say, How can we screw this kid up.
I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ''Checkout Time is 18 years.''
I wish all the mothers, fathers and children out there realize how much I need them and how much I value their support.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.