It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.

God is our father, but even more is God our mother.

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

Men are what their mothers made them.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.