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The superior man, while his parents are alive, reverently nourishes them; and, when they are dead, reverently sacrifices to them. His thought to the end of his life is how not to disgrace them.
CONFUCIUS, The Wisdom of Confucius
Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.
BARBARA WALTERS, How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything
Although your father and mother are dead, if you propose to yourself any good work, only reflect how it will make their names illustrious, and your purpose will be fixed.
CONFUCIUS, The Wisdom of Confucius
I think, one thing that I've really come to appreciate about my parents as I've got older is you know, how wise they really were. As a kid when I was growing up, as any kid, you think you know every thing and I was no different to that. I had different opinions on a lot of different things then them but the way they raised me, in hindsight, they were right.
TIGER WOODS, interview, Mar. 17, 2003
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with torture called education.
If you’ve never been hated by your child, you’ve never been a parent.
BETTE DAVIS, CBS TV, May 5, 1985
Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.
SAUL BELLOW, letter to Martin Amis, Mar. 13, 1996
A natural parent has only two things principally to consider, the improvement of his son, and the finances to do it with.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Dr. Boucher, May 13, 1770
Parents try the best they can. They want the best for you. But a lot of their stuff is just their own. If you can pull yourself away from it and not always feel like they're attacking you, then it's easier to deal with.
JESSICA ALBA, Marie Claire Magazine, March 2008
The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, Brisingr
The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of parenthood.
EVAN ESAR, The Comic Encyclopedia
We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes.
CROFT M. PENTZ, The Complete Book of Zingers
Parenting is the greatest of hum-a-few-bars-and-I'll-fake-it skills.
Right from the start my parents had left me to fend for myself. Apparently unaware that I was a kid, they invariably treated me like an adult, perhaps because they themselves were no spring chickens.
PHYLLIS DILLER, Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse
The duty of Parents to their Children does not terminate in giving them existence.
WELLINS CALCOTT, Thoughts Moral and Divine
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Middlesex
Parents are not interested in justice — they want QUIET!
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