Quotes About Fathers And Mothers

“We are born haunted, he said, his voice weak, but still clear. Haunted by our fathers and mothers and daughters, and by people we don't remember. We are haunted by otherness, by the path not taken, by the life unlived. We are haunted by the changing winds and the ebbing tides of history. And even as our own flame burns brightest, we are haunted by the embers of the first dying fire. But mostly, said Lord Jim, we are haunted by ourselves.”

— Jonathan Evison

“Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise
as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”

— Allan Bloom

“People can be, or can pose as, the enemies of God, but God will never be the enemy of any person. It is the terrible advantage children sometimes have over their fathers (and mothers).”

— Raniero Cantalamessa

“I despised how those pale-faced vegans held their little spoons, humbling themselves. Who do they think they are fooling, those bleached Brahmins? We all know that their low sitting is just another passage in their short lives. In the end, they will get bigger spoons and dig up the earth for their fathers' and mothers' inheritances.”

— Rawi Hage

“When messengers are sent to minister to the inhabitants of this earth, they are not strangers, but from the ranks of our kindred, friends, and fellow beings. Our fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters and friends who have passed away from this earth ... bringing messages of love, warning, reproof and instruction, to those whom they had learned to love in the flesh.”

— Joseph Fielding Smith

“God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean.”

— Jonathan Edwards

“Two hundred and fifty years of nameless, faceless, forgotten individuals. Yes, they were America's founding fathers and mothers as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whips upon their backs. Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?”

— Tara Conklin

“In spite of the seven thousand books of expert advice, the right way to disciplne a child is still a mystery to most fathers and ... mothers Only your grandmother and Genghis Khan know how to do it.”

— Bill Cosby

“Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.' Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. 'It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.”

— Hilary Mantel

“Wagons rattling and banging,
horses neighing and snorting,
conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip,
fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off
so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!
And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger,
blocking the way and weeping
ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.
And a passerby asks, "What's going on?"
The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time.
From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north,
and even at forty some work the army farms in the west.
When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them;
when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier.
The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,
and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended.”

— Du Fu

“Keep out of this, please, will you, Mildred? A child isn't a toy." "Oh," she said, "they grow up. Time does it more than fathers and mothers. The parents take too much credit.”

— Saul Bellow

“I hope you will like the little things I have sent you. You seem to be most interested in Railways just now, so I am sending you mostly things of that sort. I send as much love as ever, in fact more. We have both, the old Polar Bear and I, enjoyed having so many nice letters from you and your pets. If you think we have not read them you are wrong; but if you find that not many of the things you asked for have come, and not perhaps quite as many as sometimes, remember that this Christmas all over the world there are a terrible number of poor and starving people. I (and also my Green Brother) have had to do some collecting of food and clothes, and toys too, for the children whose fathers and mothers and friends cannot give them anything, sometimes not even dinner. I know yours won't forget you. So, my dears, I hope you will be happy this Christmas and not quarrel, and will have some good games with your Railway all together. Don't forget old Father Christmas, when you light your tree.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

“I've alway been struck by how little adults understand children, even their own fathers and mothers. Nothing should be kept from children on the pretext that they're little and it's too soon for them to know. Such a sad, wretched idea! Children themselves are well aware that their parents regard them as as too small and uncomprehending, when actually they understand everything. Adults don't realize that children can give extremely valuable advice in the most difficult situations. Heavens! When that pretty little bird looks at you, so happy and trusting, you are ashamed to betray it!”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.”

— Augustus Y. Napier

“That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?”

— Frances Farmer

“Fathers and mothers," she found herself saying, "leave their mark, no matter if we've known them a lifetime or only a day.”

— Nalini Singh

“Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King's daughter, I would have gone nevertheless.”

— Joan Of Arc

“Perrault took a hand. Between them they ran him about for the better part of an hour. They threw clubs at him. He dodged. They cursed him, and his fathers and mothers before him, and all his seed to come after him down to the remotest generation, and every hair on his body and drop of blood in his veins; and he answered curse with snarl and kept out of their reach. He did not try to run away, but retreated around and around the camp, advertising plainly that when his desire was met, he would come in and be good.”

— Jack London

“A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

“I hope the fathers and mothers of little girls will look at them and say 'yes, women can.'”

— Dilma Rousseff

“Good-bye, I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own.”

— Ally Condie

“There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children
so many children
children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, becuause of the simple mundane things [he] had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, [he] heard their voices, more voices then he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before.”

— Mitch Albom

“At times of distress, we all like to recall the advice of fathers and mothers. The best advice my father gave me was to keep faith and deep confidence in the potential of the Greek people; nurture the belief that they can do things.”

— George Papandreou

“We see and hear about Israelis and Palestinians only when they are defined by the global media as 'occupiers,' 'terrorists,' and 'victims.' But we forget that they are fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and neighbors and doctors and shop-owners and farmers and students.”

— Jason Alexander

“Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn't. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.”

— Steven Pressfield

“Let me tell you that the children from their very birth are born to evil. Satan seems to have control of them. He seems to take possession of their young minds, and they are corrupted. Why do fathers and mothers act as though a lethargy was upon them? They do not mistrust that Satan is sowing evil seed in their families.”

— Ellen G. White

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”

— Henrik Ibsen

“Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.”

— Dean Koontz

“Like the patriarchs of old, those who profess to love God should erect an altar to the Lord wherever they pitch their tent. If ever there was a time when every house should be a house of prayer, it is now. Fathers and mothers should often lift up their hearts to God in humble supplication for themselves and their children. Let the father, as priest of the household, lay upon the altar of God the morning and evening sacrifice, while the wife and children unite in prayer and praise. In such a household Jesus will love to tarry.”

— Ellen G. White

“If the foundation of a well-ordered society is a healthy, happy home, then the problem of lawlessness will not be solved by more laws or legislation; but by fathers and mothers exerting a moral influence and example in their own families, tempered with love and understanding.”

— J. Spencer Kinard

“The Americans say that we are ungrateful-but I ask them for heaven's sake, what should we be grateful to them for-for murdering our fathers and mothers?-Or do they wish us to return thanks to them for chaining and handcuffing us, branding us, cramming fire down our throats, or for keeping us in slavery, and beating us nearly or quite to death to make us work in ignorance and miseries, to support them and their families. They certainly think we are a gang of fools.”

— David Walker

“Fathers and mothers are just people, which means they make mistakes. Don't hold that against them. Whatever flaws they may have, they created you in a moment of love, and are among the few who knew you when. When they're gone, there won't be anyone to take their place.”

— Ernest Borgnine

“I wonder if that's the difference between fathers and mothers. I'm friends with people who have kids that are like 5 and under, and they're still in that intense mother-bonding phase. It might just be that. Because the dads haven't changed.”

— Jen Kirkman

“Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.”

— Fanny Fern

“I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order of decrepit, stammering, journeymen-teachers as well as from the new weak ones, who are generally no better for popular instruction, and entrust it to the undivided powers of Nature herself, to the light that God kindles and ever keeps alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favour with God and man.”

— Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

“We need to insist on fathers and mothers sharing the care of their offspring as well as the opportunity to enjoy the fulfillment of individual rights.”

— Mary Frances Berry

“The people whom the sons and daughters find it hardest to understand are the fathers and mothers, but young people can get on very well with the grandfathers and grandmothers.”

— Simeon Strunsky

“There are among us those that would criticize our Confederate ancestors. Would you allow a stranger to come into your house and criticize your little ones? I say it's not whether we should be ashamed of our fathers and mothers of the Old Confederacy. I say it's a question of whether they should be ashamed of us.”

— Calvin Johnson

“To all fathers and mothers of the Church, tell your children that you love them and that you are so happy to have them in your family.”

— Patricia P. Pinegar

“We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.”

— Walter Weyl

“It's a whole nother aspect of this life that most people have no idea about. There's the loved ones, the wives, the girlfriends, the children. Some of the people out here are fathers and mothers. Whether you mean to or not, you end up neglecting your family in a lot of ways. Even if you do your best to keep in touch, the fact of the matter is that you're physically absent.”

— Chuck Ragan

“For if we are bidden to honor carnal fathers and mothers, how much more the spiritual? ... If this virtue of charity has been overlooked, a man will lose any fruit of salvation in any good he may do.”

— Pope Gregory VII

“Any life he'd ever heard of, his own included, was burdened with emotions - love, loss, jobs, jealousy, money, death, pain. But if you were Jewish, always there was this extra one, the added pull at your endurance, the one more thing. There was that line in Thoreau about 'quiet desperation' - that was indeed true of most men. But for some men and women, for some fathers and mothers and children, the world still contrived that one extra test, endless and unrelenting.”

— Laura Z. Hobson

“And when children begin to use their reason, fathers and mothers should take great pains to fill their hearts with the fear of God. This the good Queen Blanche did most earnestly by St. Louis, her son: witness her oft-repeated words, "My son, I would sooner see you die than guilty of a mortal sin;" words which sank so deeply into the saintly monarch's heart, that he himself said there was no day on which they did not recur to his mind, and strengthen him in treading God's ways.”

— Saint Francis De Sales

“Fathers and mothers, do not forget that children learn more by the eye than they do by the ear ... Imitation is a far stronger principle with children than memory. What they see has a much stronger effect on their minds than what they are told.”

— J.C. Ryle

“I remember with strong feelings the families who joined our movement and paid dues long before there was any hope of winning contracts. Sometimes, fathers and mothers would take money out of their meager food budgets just because they believed that farm workers could and must build their own union. I remember thinking then that with spirit like that ... we had to win. No force on earth could stop us.”

— Cesar Chavez

“Since, though I do not repent my amorous exploits, I am far from wanting my example to contribute to the corruption of the fair sex, which deserves our homage for so many reasons, I hope that my observations will foster prudence in fathers and mothers and thus at least deserve their esteem.”

— Giacomo Casanova

“Love is the very essence of family life. Why is it that the children we love become so frequently the targets of our harsh words? Why is it that these children who love their fathers and mothers sometimes speak as if with daggers that cut to the quick? "There is beauty all around," only when there's love at home.”

— Gordon B. Hinckley

“The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“The most powerful teaching a child will ever receive will come from concerned and righteous fathers and mothers.”

— L. Tom Perry