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

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.

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.

I had a grungy period and looked like a tramp for a very long time - my mum really hated it! I destroyed her entire '70s wardrobe by putting studs into everything - I thought I was really cool. But it's good to experiment - I even had dreadlocks at one point.

It's hard to prove yourself when the substance isn't there in certain roles.

We get along really well, but TV and film aren't reality. We're best friends, but we do have our fights!

I'd done recordings, little demos, since I was in college, which I used to get gigs. But I never thought I'd have a record label.

Every shuttle mission's been successful.

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.

Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.

A stiff apology is a second insult. . . The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

I'm a huge fan of Chicago sports and Chicago food, and I love going home and my family is still there. I guess it's pretty easy to have a normal life in Chicago.

I'm very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.

I've never had a problem with drugs. I've had problems with the police.

I never liked miming.

When I first began, the technicians, camera and makeup men made me feel so self-conscious that I began to have the biggest inferiority complex about my looks.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

Three to four times a week, I get up at 7:30 A.M. while the courts are empty at Venice Beach and play full court one-on-one.

I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.

You never lose a game if the opponent doesn't score.

I grew up in Hollywood. My father always told me that this is a job. These events are filled with people you work with; it's not like glam-schmooze time. That's why I only like events that celebrate people I have a connection to; otherwise, it's someone else's night, and I don't need to show up in a dress to try and steal their attention.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

Spend hundreds of millions; talk endlessly about issues; present 12-point plans for education, the economy, and the environment. But in the end, the election of our next president can turn on a gaffe.