Quotes about parents-and-parenting

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

— Joseph Addison

It's a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

— Ama Ata Aidoo

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

— Aristotle

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

— Francis Bacon

It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.

— Simone De Beauvoir

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

— Samuel Beckett

We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.

— Henry Ward Beecher

He that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death. [Exodus 21:17]

— Bible

I don't know any parents that look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say, How can we screw this kid up.

— Russell Bishop

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.

— Allan Bloom

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: Checkout Time is 18 years.

— Erma Bombeck

Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

— H. Jackson Brown Jr.

You have to love your children unselfishly. That is hard. But it is the only way.

— Barbara Bush

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

— Samuel Butler

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

— Miguel De Cervantes

The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.

— Frank A. Clark

A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.

— Frank A. Clark

Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only a purpose or intention of parenthood.

— Robin G. Collingwood

Parents are not quite interested injustice, they are interested in quiet.

— Bill Cosby

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

— Bill Cosby

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

— Quentin Crisp

The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

— Clarence Darrow

How selfhood begins with a walking away, and love is proved in the letting go.

— Robert Cecil Day-Lewis

I wish all the mothers, fathers and children out there realize how much I need them and how much I value their support.

— Princess of Wales Diana

The sooner you treat your son as a man, the sooner he will be one.

— John Dryden

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

A mother is not a person to lean on but person to make leaning unnecessary.

— Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Let your children go if you want to keep them.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

Love well, whip well.

— Benjamin Franklin

To nourish and raise children against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

— Marilyn French

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

There are two great injustices that can befall a child. One is to punish him for something he didn't do. The other is to let him get away with doing something he knows is wrong.

— Robert Gardner

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

— Elizabeth Gaskell

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 G. Goodrich

Parents send their children to college either because they went to college, or because they didn't.

— L. L. Hendren

Stop trying to perfect your child, but keep trying to perfect your relationship with him.

— Dr. Henker

Parents, they're strict on you when you're little, and you don't understand why. But as you get older, you understand and you appreciate it.

— Grant Hill

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?

— Elizabeth Jennings

Parents are traffic signs that are always in our blind spots.

— Jeremy P. Johnson

From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

— Garrison Keillor

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.

— C. Everett Koop

The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.

— John Lennon

Having children makes one no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

— Michael Levine

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.

— John Locke

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

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.

— Don Marquis

The word no Carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes.

— Joyce Maynard

I wish you would moderate that fondness you have for your children. I do not mean you should abate any part of your care, or not do your duty to them in its utmost extent, but I would have you early prepare yourself for disappointments, which are heavy in proportion to their being surprising.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.

— Jim Morrison

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

— Lewis Mumford

Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.

— Ogden Nash

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.

— Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The parent is low, who having children, truly feels bored.

— Jean Paul

Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.

— Plato

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.

— Anthony Powell

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own -- this is happiness.

— J. B. Priestley

Maternity is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion.

— American Proverb

To understand your parents' love you must raise children yourself.

— Chinese Proverb

You must not expect old heads upon young shoulders.

— English Proverb

He that does not bring up his son to some honest calling and employment, brings him up to be a thief.

— Jewish Proverb

Parents giving the keys to the car act as if they are giving the keys to the kingdom.

— William E. Rothschild

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

— George Santayana

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 A. Schumpeter

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.

— Muriel Spark

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed. To disapprove, to condemn --the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

— Freya Stark

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

— Gloria Steinem

Children need guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

— Anne Sullivan

Don't set your wit against a child.

— Jonathan Swift

When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.

— The Talmud

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

— Alvin Toffler

My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.

— Mark Twain

If your children look up to you, you've made a success of life's biggest job.

— Source Unknown

Don't be discouraged if your children reject your advice. Years later they will offer it to their own offspring.

— Source Unknown

The trouble with parents is that by the time they are experienced, they are unemployed.

— Source Unknown

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

— Peter Ustinov

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.

— Peter De Vries

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.

— Denis Waitley

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

— Jessamyn West

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness.

— Oscar Wilde

No test tube can breed love and affection. No frozen packet of semen ever read a story to a sleepy child.

— Shirley Williams

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

— Duke of Edward Windsor

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.

— Leon R. Yankwich

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; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost :--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

— Laurence Sterne

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion-picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

— Fran Lebowitz

If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

— Bette Davis

Oh, high is the price of parenthood, and daughters may cost you double. You dare not forget, as you thought you could, that youth is a plague and a trouble.

— Phyllis Mcginley

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

— Arthur Rimbaud

Where parents do too much for their children, the children will not do much for themselves.

— Elbert Hubbard