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

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.

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.

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

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.

School is a place were you learn how to be a child.

I like people who push the envelope.

I've been a grant seeker all my life, but when I apply for one and get it, that means someone else doesn't. I didn't want to be a part of that anymore. I wanted to contribute to that pool and make it bigger.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

I'm a firm believer that it's not the way you look or what you have, but what you've got inside.

Hip-hop is bigger than the South; hip-hop is bigger than New York.

We should give as we would receive cheerfully quickly and without hesitation for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.

I wouldn't want to make the same film every time. I get easily bored.

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.

When you consider that you're a character that doesn't speak, but you've still got to react to the other actors, you've got to make a noise of some kind.

Nothing else is as fulfilling as playing a part in which you are able to have a significant say in the creative process all the way through. How many actors get to do that? It's extremely rare.

In the case of 'The Lovely Bones,' I felt that it was subject matter not often dealt with in film, and with a tone that is also rare.

The world when I was 13 wasn't truly driven by tabloid magazines and social media and reality shows. I was able to have a little more of a private life.

Before 'Idol,' I was lost... Now, I've actually followed through with something. I am a better man for it!

Without a doubt. I believe in fate the same way others believe in God. I do believe in fate.

There's no evidence whatsoever that Darwin had anything useful to say or anything to say period about how life began or how the universe began or how gravity began or how physics began or fluid motion or how thermodynamics began. He had nothing to say about that whatsoever.

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

All true happiness, pure joy, sweet bounties, and unclouded pleasure are contained within the knowledge and love of God.

Choosing my favorite moment in journalism would be like picking a favorite among my children. I can't pick one favorite.

I thought it would be cool to Skype with fans on their birthday and spend, like, a half-hour with them. I did a couple of two-hour Skypes. I just hang out with them and play songs and stuff. At first they're kind of shy, but after a while they open up. I've had a lot of people tell me I'm doing something no one has ever done before.