One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.

Having children is like living in a frat house - nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there's a lot of throwing up.

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.

There really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Your children are not your children, they come through you, but they are life itself, wanting to express itself.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support.

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.

Everything depends on upbringing.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

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

To bring up a child in the way he should go - travel that way yourself.

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

My thinking about plastic surgery is this. I haven't had it, but never say never. Because when you do, you are definitely going to go there.

I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it.

There is no conflict in looking good. You buy things you need, and then you do something good for society.

Dont waste your time striving for perfection instead strive for excellence doing your best.

Individuals have the right to pick and choose which expressions to condemn, which to praise and which to say nothing about. Governments, however, must remain neutral as to the content of expression. And governments must protect the rights of all to express even the most despicable of views.

Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.

I also like men who have hands with big masculine veins that you can squish and move.

Hope lies in dreams in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

If you are ambitious to talk well, you must be as much as possible in the society of well-bred, cultured people. If you seclude yourself, though you are a college graduate, you will be a poor converser.

I was a fighter and very determined. There was no way I was going to back out without winning.

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.

There's no doubt Matt Leinart loves his son very much.

Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.

Debt is a drag, a reality you may experience with every credit-card bill you open. But for a corporation or a government, it can be even more of a drag - on economic growth and job creation.

And I feel that we in our society should not be held by any such myth; that we should do everything we can to gain a delight and joy in our society with all the available parts of the palette.

I had a date with a girl I called 'the parrot.' All she did was repeat everything I said. She never had an original thought of her own. Everything I liked, she liked. Everything I hated, she hated. It was annoying!

There's a level of protection you need to give to your kids, and then sometimes you need to just let them figure out things on their own.

I definitely would like to do some more dramatic roles.