Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Marriage,
Family & Children
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- "A child is a person who is going to carry on what you
have started. He is going to sit where you are sitting and when you are gone, attend to
those things which you think are important. You may adopt all the policies you please, but
how they are carried out depends on him. He will assume control of your cities, states and
nations. He is going to move in and take over your churches, schools, universities, and
corporations. All your books are going to be judged, praised or condemned by him. The
fate of humanity is in his hands."
Abraham Lincoln
- Will Rogers: "Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls
nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to
reform school."
- R.W. Emerson: "There never was a child so lovely but his
mother was glad to get him asleep."
- Milton Berle: "If evolution really works, how come mothers
only have two hands?"
- Martin Mull: "Having a family is like having a bowling alley
installed in your brain."
- Paul Reiser, Babyhood: "People often ask me, 'What's
the difference between couplehood and babyhood?' In a word? Moisture. Everything in my
life is now more moist. Between your spittle, your diapers, your spit-up and drool, you
got your baby food, your wipes, your formula, your leaky bottles, sweaty baby backs, and
numerous other untraceable sources--all creating an ever-present moistness in my life,
which heretofore was mainly dry."
- Leo J. Burke: "People who say they sleep like babies usually don't
have them."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A child is a curly, dimpled
lunatic."
- Dennis Fakes: "Any child can tell you that the sole purpose of a
middle name is so he can tell when he's in trouble."
- George Bernard Shaw: "Perhaps the greatest social service that can be
rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family."
- Oscar
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Children begin by loving
their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them."
- Leo
Tolstoy:
“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way.”
- John
Rockefeller; an account by Matthew Josephson, Robber Barons: "[Rockefeller's
father said this:] I cheat my boys every chance I get, I want to make 'em sharp. I
trade with the boys and skin 'em and I just beat 'em every time I can. I want to make 'em
sharp... Once when [his mother] found out that she was punishing him for a misdeed at
school of which he was innocent, she said, 'Never mind, we have started in on this
whipping and it will do for the next time.' The normal outcome of such disciplinary
cruelty would be deception and stealthiness in the boy, as a defense... This harshly
disciplined boy, quiet, shy, reserved, serious, received but a few years' poor schooling,
and worked for neighboring farmers in all his spare time. His whole youth suggests only
abstinence, prudence and the growth of parsimony in his soul. The pennies he earned he
would save steadily in a blue bowl that stood on a chest in his room, and accumulated
until there was a small heap of gold coins..."
- Sam Levenson: "The reason grandparents and grandchildren
get along so well is that they have a common enemy."
- Abraham Lincoln: "Marriage is neither heaven nor hell. It
is simply purgatory."
- James Baldwin: "Children have never been very good at listening to
their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
- Carl Sandburg: "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go
on."
- Samuel
Goodrich: "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."
- Robert Byrne: "Learning to dislike children at an early age
saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life."
- Sherry Cartwright, quoted in Focus on the Family:
"My daughter taught my 3-year-old grandson to be polite. After her friend gave him a
haircut, she prompted Tyler, 'What do you say to Wes for cutting your hair?' Not liking
the buzz cut, Tyler hung his head and said softly, 'I forgive you.'"
- John
Adams (1735 - 1826),
letter
to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780:
"I
must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and
philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history,
naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a
right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and
porcelain."
- Dr.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, The Tunnel and the Light: "In our
society the only people usually who give us totally unconditional love are the very old
people: Grandmas and Grandpas. In a society where every generation lives all by themselves
... most children miss that aspect of growing up. And that gives the children their first
problems in [their emotional] development ... [because] between the ages
of one and six ... [children] get all their basic attitudes that will mark them
for life. Our children need to be raised with unconditional love and firm
consistent discipline, but with no punishment [that is, there must be no
spirit of hostility when our children are corrected] ... it is possible to
dislike their behavior and still love them. If you are able to do that, the children
develop a very beautiful intellectual [capacity] at around the age of
six, they love to learn and going to school is a challenge, not a threat... If you
have lived with unconditional love early in life, things can get very bad later in life,
and you will still be able to cope with it. If you have experienced
unconditional love once, it will last for your whole life-time. It does not have
to be from your father or mother who may not be capable of giving it because they
themselves have never received it."
- Mark
Twain: "Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all
growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a
quarter of a century."
- Socrates: "By all means marry. If you get a good wife you
will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher."
- Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, U. of Arizona, The AfterLife
Experiments: "The Harvard Mastery of Stress Study
was originally conducted in the early 1950s with 126 healthy male Harvard undergraduate
students. Each student received a physical and psychiatric exam, and filled out
an inch-thick stack of pencil-and-paper tests... [included] fourteen questions that rated
the men's perceptions of their mothers' love and caring, and fourteen that rated the men's
perceptions of their fathers' love and caring, based on criteria such as how loving, fair,
just, and kind the parents had been during the men's childhood and adolescence. Could
these simple ratings of perceived parental love obtained in college serve as a predictor
of their long-term health thirty-five and forty-two years later? When we
calculated the scores and entered them in the computer, the results were clear cut-and
startling. The findings indicated that perceptions of parental love in college did indeed
predict long-term physical health in later life. We created four possible subgroups based
on their college ratings: (1) father and mother both rated high; (2) father rated high,
mother rated low; (3) father rated low, mother rated high; and (4) father and mother both
rated low. For those men who rated both their parents high in love and caring
while they were in college, about 25 percent had a confirmed diagnosis of physical disease
thirty-five years later. The diseases included cancer, heart problems, high blood
pressure, arthritis, and asthma. However, for those men who had rated both of
their parents low in love and caring, 87 percent had a diagnosed disease thirty-five years
later. Not surprisingly, of men who rated one of their parents high and the other
low, approximately half had a diagnosed disease in midlifie. The higher their perception
of parental love, the healthier their lives. And we found that these patterns were
independent of family and genetic history of disease, death, and divorce history of
parents, as well as the smoking and marital histories of the men themselves. None of these
familiar, well-established risk factors could explain the findings obtained. What
did these strong data suggest? Since the men who perceived themselves as coming from the
most loving parents had the lowest rates of physical disease, this implied that love might
be acting as a buffer, protecting a person from the deleterious health consequences of
risk factors-even such significant factors as genetic predisposition, divorce, and
cigarette smoking. (The results of this study were reported by us in a 1997 article in the
Journal Psychosomatic Medicine.)"
- Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, Jewish scholar, Ban HaMelek VeHaNazir:
"Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your double, and
after that, your friend or foe, depending on his bringing up."
- Abraham Lincoln: "No man is poor who had a godly
mother."
- Michael Corleone, The Godfather III: "The only
wealth in this world is children."
- Donald G. Smith: "The family seems to have two predominant
functions: to provide warmth and love in time of need -- and to drive each other
insane."
- Theodore M. Hesburgh: "The most important thing a father
can do for his children is to love their mother."
- Martin Luther: "There is no more lovely, friendly, and
charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage."
- Garrison Keillor: "Nothing you do for children is ever
wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer
thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted."
- Kahlil Gibran: "On Children: You may give them your love
but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts; you may house their bodies but
not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams."
- Joesph Campbell, The Power of Myth: "...marriage
is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the
right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male
or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we'll
marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of ... God,
and that's what marriage is... I've been amazed at the number of my friends who in their
forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the
child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child
[not] their own personal relationship to each other. Marriage is a relationship. When you
make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a
relationship... You're no longer one alone; your identity is in a relationship.
Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of
ego to a relationship in which two have become one."
- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851: "There is no absurdity so
palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head, if only you begin to
inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great
solemnity."
- Herbert Spencer: "The ultimate consequence of protecting
men from the results of their own folly is to fill the world with fools."
- Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep), The
Bridges of Madison County: "I gave my life to my family."
- Groucho Marx: "I was married by a judge -- it should have
been a jury!"
- Diefendorf & Madden, 3 Dimensional Wealth:
"Studies have shown that too much money, especially in the hands of very young
adults, can do more harm than good. Often there is a lack of
self-esteem that goes along with inherited money... of guilt and shame... [and] the
lack of humility that accompanies an opulent life-style... Lack of initiative and drive
can be a result... Warren Buffett puts it this way: 'I want to leave my children enough so
that they can do anything they want but not enough so that they don't have to do anything
at all.' ... If money alone is left to children, without being left in a wrapper of
personal wealth (wisdom) and social wealth (values), more often than not your children
will end up with financial problems..."
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- Bill Cosby: "That married couples can live together day
after day is a miracle that the Vatican has overlooked."
- Robert E. Lee: "As a general principle you should not force young men to do their duty, but let them do it
voluntarily and thereby develop their characters."
- Anna Quindlen: "I would be most content if my children grew
up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough
bookshelves."
- "The only wealth in this world is children."
Michael Corleone, The Godfather
III
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