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family 2
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Family
life is full of major and minor crises--the ups and downs
of health,
success and failure in career, marriage, and
divorce--and all kinds of characters.
It is tied to
places and events and histories. With all of these felt
details,
life etches itself into memory and personality.
It's difficult to imagine
anything more nourishing to the
soul.
Thomas Moore |
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It seems to me that since I've had
children, I've grown richer and deeper.
They may have
slowed down my writing
for a while, but when I did write,
I
had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler
Your success as family,
our success
as a society,
depends not on what happens in the White House,
but on
what happens inside your house.
Barbara
Bush |
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A roof to keep out the rain.
Four walls to
keep out the wind. Floors to keep out
the cold. Yes, but
home is more than that. It is the laugh of a baby, the
song
of a mother, the strength of a father. Warmth of
loving hearts, light from
happy eyes, kindness, loyalty,
comradeship. Home is first school and
first church for
the young ones, where they learn what is right, what is
good,
and what is kind. Where they go for comfort when
they are hurt or sick.
Where joy is shared and sorrow
eased. Where fathers and mothers are respected
and loved. Where children are wanted. Where the simplest food is
good enough
for kings because it is earned. Where money
is not so important as loving-kindness. Where even the
teakettle sings from happiness. That is home. God bless
it.
Ernestine Schuman-Heink
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Perhaps the
greatest social service that can be rendered
by anybody to this country and to mankind is
to bring up a family.
George
Bernard Shaw |
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What families have in
common the world around
is that they are the place where
people learn
who they are and how to be that way.
Jean Illsley Clarke |
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Science
has established two facts meaningful for human welfare:
first, the foundation of the structure of human
personality
is laid down in early childhood; and second,
the chief engineer
in charge of this construction is the
family.
Meyer Francis Nimkoff |
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To
nourish children and raise them against odds is in any
time,
any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars
or design nuclear weapons.
Marilyn
French |
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Parents
have become so convinced that educators
know what is best
for their children
that they forget that they themselves
are really the experts.
Marian
Wright Edelman |
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easier to build a child up well than it is to fix an adult. |
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There
is one practice which any family can maintain and that is
the practice
of a time of worship at each family meal. Nearly all families are together
for at least one meal a
day and, in any case, should sacrifice much else
to make
this possible. The table is really the family altar! Here
those
of all ages come together and help to sustain both
their physical
and their spiritual existence. If a
sacrament is "an actual conveyance
of spiritual
meaning and power by a material process," then a
family meal
can be a sacrament. It entwines the material
and the spiritual in a remarkable way.
The food, in and
of itself, is purely physical, but it represents human
service in its use.
Here, at one common table, is the
father who has earned, the mother who has prepared
or
planned, and the children who share, according to need,
whatever their antecedent participation may have been.
When we realize how
deeply a meal together can be a spiritual and
regenerating experience, we can understand something of
why our Lord,
when he broke bread with his little company
toward the end of their
earthly fellowship, told them, as
often as they did it, to remember him.
We, too, seek to
be members of his sacred fellowship, and irrespective
of
what we do about the Eucharist, there is no reason why
each family meal
should not take on something of the
character of a time of memory and hope.
Elton
Trueblood |
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Who of us is mature enough for offspring
before
the offspring themselves arrive? The value
of
marriage is not that adults produce children,
but that
children produce adults.
Peter De Vries |
I have found the best
way to give advice
to your children is to find out what
they want
and then advise them to do it.
Harry
S. Truman |
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Let parents
bequeath to their children not riches,
but the spirit of reverence.
Plato
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Every
generation revolts against its parents
and makes friends with its grandparents.
Lewis
Mumford |
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Lord,
this humble house we'd keep
Sweet with play and calm with sleep.
Help us so that we may give
Beauty to the lives we live.
Let Thy love and let Thy grace
Shine upon our dwelling place.
Edgar
A. Guest |
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Parents belong to
the world of the past; children belong to the world
of the
future. Both share the world of the present, but neither can
enter
or fully understand the other's world and time. It is
easier to communicate across miles than across years. We meet
and laugh awhile;
we separate and grieve awhile. And then we
remember.
Joseph
A. Bauer
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We don't have
choices about who our parents are and how they treated us,
but we have
a choice about whether we forgive our parents and heal ourselves.
Bernie Siegel |
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American families have always shown remarkable
resiliency, or flexible adjustment to
natural, economic, and social challenges. Their strengths
resemble the elasticity of a
spider web, a gull's skillful flow with the wind, the regenerating
power of perennial grasses,
the cooperation of an ant colony, and the persistence of a stream
carving canyon rocks.
These are not the strengths of fixed monuments but living
organisms. This resilience
is not measured by wealth, muscle or efficiency but by creativity,
unity, and hope.
Cultivating these family strengths is critical to a thriving human
community.
Ben Silliman |
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