FATHER/MOTHER

Listen, my child, to what your father teaches you. Don’t neglect your mother’s teaching. What you learn from them will crown you with grace and clothe you with honor.

Proverbs 1:8–9

Sensible children bring joy to their father; foolish children despise their mother.

Proverbs 15:20

Listen to your father, who gave you life, and don’t despise your mother’s experience when she is old.

Proverbs 23:22

If you curse your father and mother, the lamp of your life will be snuffed out.

Proverbs 20:20

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother.

George Washington

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man in love with a girl—no superior alternative has yet been found.

Winston Churchill

Since a child at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living for its own reward.

Harry S. Truman

My best training came from my father.

Woodrow Wilson

My father was the dominant person in our family and in my life.

Jimmy Carter

As a substitute father for hundreds of youths over the past thirteen years, I’ve yet to encounter a young person in trouble whose difficulty could not be traced to the lack of a strong father image in the home.

Paul Anderson

While I don’t minimize the vital role played by a mother, I believe a successful family begins with her husband.

James Dobson

What a father says to his children is not heard by the world, but it will be heard by posterity.

Jean Paul Richter

There are too many fathers who tie up their hound dog at night and let their boys run loose.

If mothers would understand that much of their importance lies in building up the father image for the child, the children would turn out well.

Samuel S. Liebowitz

If Nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.

Laurence Housman

The chances are that you’ll never be elected President of the country, write the great American novel, make a million dollars, stop pollution and racial conflict, or save the world. However valid it may be to work at any of these goals, there is another one of higher priority—to be an effective parent.

Landrum R. Bolling

They say that man is mighty,

He governs land and sea,

He wields a mighty scepter

O’er lesser powers than he.

But a mighty power and stronger

Man from his throne has hurled:

For the hand that rocks the cradle

is the hand that rules the world.

William Wallace

Let every Christian father and mother understand that when the child is three years old, they have done more than half of what they will ever do for his character.

Could I turn back the time machine, I would double the attention I gave my children and go to fewer meetings.

J. D. Eppinga

A child is not likely to find a father in God unless he finds something of God in his father.

Austin L. Sorensen

It is easier to build boys than to mend men.

Children are a poor man’s wealth.

Danish Proverb