When bairns are young they gar their parents' heads ache; when they are auld they make their hearts break.
This is a nation of runaways. Every person comes from somewhere else. Even the Indians, they run once upon a time across the Alaskan land bridge. The blacks, they maybe didn't run from Africa, okay, but they ran from slavery. And the rest of us, we all ran from something. From the church, the state, the parents, the Irish potato bug. And I think this is why Americans are so restless.
If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Rahab was smitten with astonishment. “A god that feeds his people by raining bread from heaven.” “Oh, that’s only one of the miracles that God has given to us.” Othniel went on to tell about how water flowed from a solid rock in the desert when the people were thirsty and there was no water. He told about how God had miraculously cared for Israel during its long wanderings. “It’s been forty years now, and God’s taken care of us.” “Tell me about yourself,” Rahab said. “About me? Well, there’s nothing much to tell. My parents are dead. Ardon up there on the roof, he’s my cousin.” He laughed shortly and said, “He’s the good one. I’m the bad one.
Maybe I was crazy to consider it, but I’d always hoped that if I were a good enough girl, if I did everything right, if I said the right things or said nothing at all—I thought my parents would change their minds. I thought they would finally listen when I tried to talk. I thought they would give me a chance. I thought they might finally love me. I always had that stupid hope.
It is the common error of builders and parents to follow some plan they think beautiful (and perhaps is so) without considering that nothing is beautiful which is displaced.
The son of parents pass'd into the skies.
The longer we live and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends.
The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.
Mendico ne parentes quidem amici sunt=--To a beggar not even his own parents show affection.
Her parents kissed her on each side. Her mother took both her hands now and held them against her cheek, as if in prayer. “We tried everything to get Hannah out. We took her on long vacations, we sent her to live with my cousin in Atlanta, we tried traditional church. But she went to California to join the temple commune. There was nothing we could do. The law wasn’t on our side, Hannah wasn’t on our side. The cult even had armed bodyguards to keep parents like us from snatching our children back.
It is a great fault in painters to repeat the same movements, the same faces and manners of stuffs in one subject, and to let the greater part of his faces resemble their creator; and this has often been a source of wonder to me, for I have known some who in all their figures seem to have depicted themselves. And in the figures the actions and ways of the painter were visible. And if they are prompt in action and in their ways the figures are likewise prompt; and if the painter is pious, the figures with their twisted necks appear pious likewise, and if the painter is lazy the figures seem like laziness personified, and if the painter is deformed so are his figures, and if he is mad it is amply visible in figures of his subjects, which are devoid of intention and appear to be heedless of their action, some looking in one direction, some in another, as though they were dreaming; and therefore every manifestation in the picture corresponds to a peculiarity in the painter. And as I have often thought over the cause of this fault, it seems to me that we must conclude that the spirit which directs and governs everybody is that which forms our intellect, or rather, it is our intellect itself. It has {119} devised the whole figure of man according as it has thought fit that it should be, either with long or a short and turned-up nose, and thus it has determined its height and figure; and so powerful is the intellect that it gives motion to the arms of the painter and causes him to reproduce himself, since it appears to the spirit that this is the true method of portraying man, and he that does otherwise is in error. And should this spirit find any one who resembles its body, which it has formed, it loves it and becomes enamoured with it, and for this reason many men fall in love and marry wives which resemble themselves, and often the children which are born of the issue resemble their parents.
so much my parents as my little brother. What would this do to him?
(Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much.
unfathomable to the most experienced prophets in Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year. We had two weeks of the coldest weather since 1885, Atticus said. Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.
Le sort fait les parents, le choix fait les amis=--It is to chance we owe our relatives, to choice our friends.
Sorrow is necessary and good for men; one learns to understand that each joy must be indemnified by suffering, that each new tie which knits our hearts to this life must be loosed again, and the tighter and the closer it was knit, the keener the pain of loosening it. Should we then attach our hearts to nothing, and pass quietly and unsympathetically through this world, as if we had nothing to do with it? We neither could nor ought to act so. Nature itself knits the first tie between parents and children, and new ties through our whole life. We are not here for reward, for the enjoyment of undisturbed peace or from mere accident, but for trial, for improvement, perhaps for punishment; for the only union which can secure the happiness of men, the union between our Self and God's Self, is broken, or at least obscured, by our birth, and the highest object of our life is to find this bond again, to remain ever conscious of it and hold fast to it in life and in death. This rediscovery of the eternal union between God and man constitutes true religion among all people.
If they could swing it, most parents visited during meals to try to make their child’s hospital room into a piece of the familiar by eating with them, and the kids—without exception—were too kind to tell them it only made home look that much farther away.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
she hadn’t starved to death like they had expected her to, and she hadn’t crawled back to them for help either. It gave her satisfaction to know her parents were irked by this. They had fully expected her to fail and run back home, begging them to take her back.
The rich left their wealth, children left the luxurious homes of their parents to go into the austerity of the desert, etc., according to Philo the Jew. All this was foretold long ages ago. For two thousand years no Gentile had worshipped the God of the Jews, and at the time foretold, the crowd of Gentiles worshipped this only God. The temples were destroyed, the very kings bowed themselves under the cross. All this was of the Spirit of God spread abroad upon the earth.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Laus magna natis obsequi parentibus=--Great praise is the meed of children who respect the wishes of their parents.
Don’t try to understand other people’s marriages, darling, even your parents’. You’ll be lucky if you understand your own.
I am a woman of very few layers, and most of them are selfish and mean. My parents tried to make me a good girl, but I just wasn’t having it.
a mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student’s performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.
Les amis, ces parents que l'on se fait soi-meme=--Friends, those relations that we make ourselves.
When I was a kid my parents used to tell me: "Don't go near the cellar door, Emo!" One day when they were away, I went to the door and opened it... and I saw birds and trees...
What prompts thee, O man, to abandon thy habitations in the city, to leave thy parents and friends, and to seek rural spots in the mountains and valleys, if it be not the natural beauty of the world, which, if thou reflectest, thou dost enjoy solely by means of the sense of sight? And if the poet wishes to be called a painter in this connection also, why didst thou not take the descriptions of places made by the poet and remain at home without exposing thyself to the heat of the sun? Oh! would not this have been more profitable and less fatiguing to thee, since this can be done in the cool without motion and danger of illness? But the soul could not enjoy the benefit of the eyes, the windows of its dwelling, and it could not note the character of joyous {76} places; it could not see the shady valleys watered by the sportiveness of the winding rivers; it could not see the various flowers, which with their colours make a harmony for the eye, and all the other objects which the eye can apprehend. But if the painter in the cold and rigorous season of winter can evoke for thee the landscapes, variegated and otherwise, in which thou didst experience thy happiness; if near some fountain thou canst see thyself, a lover with thy beloved, in the flowery fields, under the soft shadow of the budding boughs, wilt thou not experience a greater pleasure than in hearing the same effect described by the poet?
We soon got the idea that ‘Italian’ meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization,” Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. “We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents.
The gods do not avenge on the son the misdeeds of the father. Each or good or bad reaps the due reward of his own actions. Parents' blessing, not their curse, is inherited.
We become chiefly what we are more through others than through ourselves, and happy is the man whose path in life leads him only by good men and brings him together with good men. How often we forget in judging others the influences under which they have grown up. How can one expect a child to be truthful when he sees how servants, yes often parents, practise deceit. How many children hear from those to whom they look up, expressions, principles, and prudent rules of life, which consciously or unconsciously exercise an influence on the young life of the child. Yet with how little of loving introspection we pass our judgments.
The good-will of parents procures the good-will of God.
I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.
You must accustom yourself more and more to the thought that here is not our abiding city, that all that we call ours here is only lent, not given us, and that if the sorrow for those we have lost remains the same, we must yet acknowledge with gratitude to God the great blessing of having enjoyed so many years with those whom He gave us, as parents, or children, or friends. One forgets so easily the happy years one has had with those who were the nearest to us. Even these years of happiness, however short they may have been, were only given us, we had not deserved them. I know well there is no comfort for this pain of parting: the wound always remains, but one learns to bear the pain, and learns to thank God for what He gave, for the beautiful memories of the past, and the yet more beautiful hope for the future. If a man has lent us anything for several years, and at last takes it back, he expects gratitude, not anger; and if God has more patience with our weakness than men have, yet murmurs and complaints for the life which He measured out for us as is best for us, are not what He expected from us. A spirit of resignation to God's will is our only comfort, the only relief under the trials God lays upon us, and with such a spirit the heaviest as well as the lightest trials of life are not only bearable, but useful, and gratitude to God and joy in life and death remain untroubled.
_Another proof._--The longevity of the patriarchs, instead of causing the loss of past history, was the rather serviceable for its preservation. For if we are not always well instructed in the history of our ancestors, it is because we have never lived much with them, and because they are often dead before we have ourselves attained the age of reason. But when men lived so long, children lived long with their parents, and long conversed with them. Now, their conversation could only be of the history of their ancestors, since to that all history was reduced, and men did not study science or art, which now take up so much of our daily discourse. We see also that at that time men took special care to preserve their genealogies.
There’s wisdom in not pissing certain people off. It’s plain that neither of my parents really subscribes to that theory. Further to this wisdom, I think, is that cozying up to the right people can get you places that “being yourself” will never get you.
~Aristocracy.~--And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.--_De Foe._
Children see in their parents the past, they again in their children the future; and if we find more love in parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad indeed, but natural. Who does not fondle his hopes more than his recollections?
Great families of yesterday we show, And lords, whose parents were the Lord knows who.
It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew - and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.
What Heredity has to do for us is determined outside ourselves. No man can select his own parents. But every man to some extent can choose his own Environment. His relation to it, however largely determined by Heredity in the first instance, is always open to alteration. And so great is his control over Environment and so radical its influence over him, that he can so direct it as either to undo, modify, perpetuate, or intensify the earlier hereditary influences within certain limits. Natural Law, Environment, p. 257.
Cari sunt parentes, cari liberi, propinqui, familiares; sed omnes omnium caritates, patria una complexa est=--Dear are our parents, dear our children, our relatives, and our associates, but all our affections for all these are embraced in our affection for our native land.
Justitia erga Deum religio dicitur; erga parentes pietas=--The discharge of our duty towards God is called religion; towards our parents, piety.
Obey thy parents; keep thy word justly; swear not; set not thy sweet heart on proud array.
We must learn to live two lives--this short life here on earth with its joys and sorrows, and that true life beyond, of which this is only a fragment or an interruption. When we enter into that true life, we shall find what we cannot find here, we shall find what we have lost here. If only so many things did not seem so irregular, so unnatural. The death of young children before their parents. We love them better because we know we can lose them--that is true--but yet it is a hard lesson to learn.
Indecision and delay are the parents of failure.
Respect for one's parents is the highest of the duties of civil life.
Everyone has parents. It's unavoidable.
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely,
Un bon ami vaut mieux que cent parents=--A good friend is worth more than a hundred relations.
The central gate of heaven is open to the man who has been dutiful to his parents.
Those parents who do not educate their sons are their enemies; for as is a crane among swans, so are ignorant sons in a public assembly.
In great states, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of them. In vile states, the children are always wanting to be men and women, and the parents to keep them children.
The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.
At the age of one year old, Harry had somehow survived a curse from the greatest Dark sorcerer of all time, Lord Voldemort, whose name most witches and wizards still feared to speak. Harry’s parents had died in Voldemort’s attack, but Harry had escaped with his lightning scar, and somehow — nobody understood why — Voldemort’s powers had been destroyed the instant he had failed to kill Harry.
The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take after me. Dominican parents! You got to love them!
Education is generally the worse in proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the parents.
The joy of parents in their children prolongs life.
Dos est magna parentum / Virtus=--The virtue of parents is a great dowry.
To a father, when his child dies, the future dies; to a child when his parents die, the past dies.
I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Safety Net-ism: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
"There is no Father Christmas. It's just a marketing ploy to make low income
"... I want you to picture the trusting face of a child, streaked with tears
because of what you just said."
"I want you to picture the face of its mother, because one week's dole won't
pay for one Master of the Universe Battlecruiser!"
-- Filthy Rich and Catflap
Down-Nesting: The tendency of parents to move to smaller, guest-room-free houses after the children have moved away so as to avoid children aged 20 to 30 who have boomeranged home. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated
You had some happiness once, but your parents moved away, and you had to leave it behind.
Pull-the-Plug, Slice the Pie: A fantasy in which an offspring mentally tallies up the net worth of his parents. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
We are the people our parents warned us about.
Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts -- there is just too much misery and cruelty for that. On the other hand, I respect and envy the people who get inspiration from their religions. -- Benjamin Spock
Each person has the right to take part in the management of public affairs in his country, provided he has prior experience, a will to succeed, a university degree, influential parents, good looks, a curriculum vitae, two 3x4 snapshots, and a good tax record.
Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love; Husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on (and in real life, I might add) spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very _____least he can do is to shut up! -- Tom Lehrer, "That Was the Year that Was"
If parents would only realize how they bore their children. -- G. B. Shaw
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. -- Oscar Wilde
A grade school teacher was asking students what their parents did for a living. "Tim, you be first," she said. "What does your mother do all day?" Tim stood up and proudly said, "She's a doctor." "That's wonderful. How about you, Amie?" Amie shyly stood up, scuffed her feet and said, "My father is a mailman." "Thank you, Amie," said the teacher. "What about your father, Billy?" Billy proudly stood up and announced, "My daddy plays piano in a whorehouse." The teacher was aghast and promptly changed the subject to geography. Later that day she went to Billy's house and rang the bell. Billy's father answered the door. The teacher explained what his son had said and demanded an explanation. Billy's father replied, "Well, I'm really an attorney. But how do you explain a thing like that to a seven-year-old child?"