One man has never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.
~ Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy
Every woman should marry, and no man.
~ Benjamin Disraeli, in Lothair
Vitium uxoris aut tollendum aut ferendum est. Qui tollit vitium, uxorem commodiorem praestat; qui fert, sese meliorem facit. [A wife's faults must either be corrected or put up with. Who corrects the faults, makes his wife more pleasant; who puts up with them, makes himself a better man.]
~ Lucius Afranius, in Satirae Menippeae, De Officio mariti
The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.
~ Emma Goldman
Once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched.
~ Ernest Hemingway, in The Three-Day Blow
A good marriage is when you’re married not to someone you can live with, but to someone you really cannot live without.
~ Dr. Howard Hendricks
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It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
~ Erma Bombeck
Parents are not interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.
~ Bill Cosby
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
~ Phyllis Diller
The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
~ King Edward VII
The reason you want your kids to pay attention in school is you haven’t the faintest idea how to do their homework.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz
Nurses nurse
and teachers teach
and tailors mend
and preachers preach
and barbers trim
and chauffeurs haul
and parents get to do it all.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz
An advantage of having one child is you always know who did it.
~ Babs Bell Hajdusiewicz
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next.
~ Franklin P. Jones
A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Our children are being raised by appliances.
~ Bill Moyers
Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.
~ Robert Orben
I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
~ Robert Orben
I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future.
~ Anna Quindlen
Have children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.
~ Rita Rudner
Parents, if you love your children, do all that lies in your power to train them up to a habit of prayer. Show them how to begin. Tell them what to say. Encourage them to persevere. Remind them if they become careless and slack about it. Let it not be your fault, at any rate, if they never call on the name of the Lord.
~ John Ryle, in The Duties of Parents
A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family.
~ Thomas Scott
An evil upbringing in the home is worse than the wars of God and Magog.
~ Talmud, Berakot, 7
He who teaches his son is as if he had taught his son, his son’s son, and so on to the end of all generations.
~ Talmud, Kiddushin, 30
Do not threaten a child. Either punish or forgive him.
~ Talmud, Semahot, 2, 6
Parents: A peculiar group who first try to get their children to walk and talk, and then try to get them to sit down and shut up.
~ Wagster’s Dictionary of Humor and Wit
Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.
~ John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
I’ve got two wonderful children — and two out of five isn’t too bad.
~ Henry Youngman
Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right, and the other is a husband.
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The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby’s grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.
~ Dave Barry
If your baby is “beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time,” you’re the grandma.
~ Teresa Bloomingdale
Becoming a grandmother is wonderful. One moment you’re just a Mother. The next you are all-wise and prehistoric.
~ Pam Brown
Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old; it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother.
~ G. Norman Collie
What is it about grandparents that is so lovely? I’d like to say that grandparents are God’s gifts to children. And if they can but see, hear and feel what these people have to give, they can mature at a fast rate.
~ Bill Cosby
Grandma always made you feel she had been waiting to see just you all day and now the day was complete.
~ Marcy DeMaree
Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
~ Alex Haley
One of the most powerful handclasps is that of a new grandbaby around the finger of a grandfather.
~ Joy Hargrove
When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.
~ Ogden Nash
An hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again. Anything longer than that, and you start to age quickly.
~ Gene Perret
Grandchildren don’t stay young forever, which is good because Pop-pops have only so many horsey rides in them.
~ Gene Perret
I wish I had the energy that my grandchildren have – if only for self-defense.
~ Gene Perret
My grandkids believe I’m the oldest thing in the world. And after two or three hours with them, I believe it, too.
~ Gene Perret
What a bargain grandchildren are! I give them my loose change, and they give me a million dollars’ worth of pleasure.
~ Gene Perret
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
~ Proverb
Perfect love sometimes does not come until the first grandchild.
~ Welsh Proverb
If becoming a grandmother was only a matter of choice, I should advise every one of you straight away to become one. There is no fun for old people like it!
~ Hannah Whithall Smith
Never have children, only grandchildren.
~ Gore Vidal
Grandchildren are God’s way of compensating us for growing old.
~ Mary H. Waldrip
If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I’d have had them first.
~ Lois Wyse
Your son at five is your master, at ten your slave, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or your foe, depending on his bringing up.
~ Hasdai Ibn Shaprut
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Parents often bless their children in ways beyond their understanding. What obligation do we have to share the meaning behind our actions and words?
When Rabban Gamaliel gave his daughter in marriage, she asked for his blessing. He said: “May I not see your return.” When her son was born, she asked again for her father’s blessing, and he said: “May it be God’s will that the words: ‘Woe is me’ cease not out of your mouth.”
“Why is it, my father,” asked the daughter, “that you curse me on my two days of rejoicing?”
“These are indeed blessings and not curses,” responded Rabban Gamaliel. “If peace shall abide in your family life, you will not return to my home to live. And if yoru son is strong and hearty, you will continually remark: ‘Woe is me; the child ate too little; he drank not his milk; he is late for school.’”
(Bereshit Rabbah, 26)
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Civilization built upon civilization. Layers upon layers of the remains of people. Why is it that throughout history people have continued to inhabit the same geographic spaces? An earthquake destroys a city and the city is rebuilt. A neighboring tribe tears down protective walls and burns the homes, and the walls and homes are reconstructed. Certainly some causality can be ascribed to the fact that cities tend to be built in locations conducive to survival — near water, strategically elevated, etc. However, a large part of the answer has to do with the fact that “there is no place like home.”
I moved away from Northeastern Oklahoma twenty-five years ago. But it is still home. When I make the trip back to be with family and friends I can physically feel the tension release its hold on my body as I enter the familiar spaces of my childhood. In the last year I lost my mother and oldest brother to death. My father’s mental condition has deteriorated to the point that when I talk with him on the phone I am not sure that he knows who I am. Even as I write these words the cherished possessions of my parents are being prepared for an estate sale and my childhood home is being sold. The school from which I graduated has closed and the city of my youth has been all but wiped from the face of the earth due to a tornado and environmental pollution. My childhood friends have scattered to distant locations; Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, and beyond. And yet, it is the place that I still think of as “home”.
Why? Why are people so inextricably tied to their place of birth?
The rabbis said that God gives grace to a place in the eyes of its inhabitants. Consider the following story drawn from the Talmud;
A Sophist said to the Emperor Diocletian that no man could be happy except in the place of birth; the same is true, he said, of animals. To substantiate his words, he sent marked stags to Phrygia, and after a few years they returned.
Rabbi Simeon ben Kakish was studying on a porch in Tiberias and he heard two women passers-by say: “How happy we are to leave this accursed climate.” Interested, he asked them whence they had come and whither they were going. “We came from Mazega and we are returning,” they said. Rabbi Simeon turned to his Disciples and remarked: “I was once in Mazega and found the climate there abominable. Yet the natives are convinced it is the very best of places. Blessed is God who giveth grace to a place in the eyes of its inhabitants.”
(Bereshit Rabbah, 34)
Can a goat live in the same barn as a tiger? In the same fashion, a daughter-in-law cannot live with her mother-in-law under the same roof.
~ Talmud, Maaseh Torah, 4
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This evening my wife shared with me the story of a mother who lost her child in the tsunami brought about by the earthquake near Samoa. The mother had gone to pick up her 8-year-old daughter from school following the earthquake. As they returned home they were caught in the tidal wave. Despite the mother’s best effort to hold on to her daughter, she slipped from her grasp and was swept away as she cried out in panic for her mother to help her. They found the body of the little girl several hours later still wearing her school backpack.
My heart breaks and tears come as I think about the pain of losing a child. My impulse is to fall in line with Theoden from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when he says after losing his son, “No parent should have to bury their child.”
Nevertheless, they do. So perhaps a better way to think of it comes to us from the account of Rabbi Meir and his wife;
While Rabbi Meir was holding his weekly discourse on Sabbath afternoon, his two beloved sons died suddenly at home. Their mother covered them with a sheet, and forbore to mourn on the sacred day. When Rabbi Meir returned after the evening Services, he asked for his sons, whom he had not seen in the synagogue. She asked him to recite the Habdalah and gave him his evening meal. Then she said: “I have a question to ask thee. A friend once gave me jewels to keep for him; now he wishes them again. Shall I return them?”
“Beyond doubt thou must,” said Rabbi Meir.
His wife took him by the hand, led him to the bed and drew back the sheet. Rabbi Meir burst into bitter weeping, and his wife said: “They were entrusted to us for a time; now their Master has taken back His very own.”
(Midrash Mishle, 28)
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