Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If y...ou are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However, it can't be helped; mothers, if they do their job properly, are the representatives of the hard, demanding world and it i...s they who gradually introduce reality which is so often the enemy of impulse. There is anger with mother and hatred is somewhere even when there is absolutely no doubt of love that is mixed with adoration.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If mothers are told to do this or that or the other,... they lose touch with their own ability to act.... Only too easily they fee...l incompetent. If they must look up everything in a book, they are always too late even when they do the right things, because the right things have to be done immediately. It is only possible to act at exactly the right point when the action is intuitive or by instinct, as we say. The mind can be brought to bear on the problem afterwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom al...l is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you could choose your parents,... we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt--at any rate who felt responsible, an...d felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault--we'd rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn't take responsibility for anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's only too easy to idealise a mother's job. We know well that every job has its frustrations and its boring routines and its ti...mes of being the last thing anyone would choose to do. Well, why shouldn't the care of babies and children be thought of that way too?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't mind saying in advance that in my opinion jealousy is normal and healthy. Jealousy arises out of the fact that children lo...ve. If they have no capacity to love, then they don't show jealousy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the scientist the formulation of questions is almost the whole thing. The answers, when found, only lead on to other questions.... The nightmare of the scientist is the idea of complete knowledge. He shudders to think of such a thing. Compare this with the certainty that belongs to religion, and you will see how different science is from religion. Religion replaces doubt with certainty. Science holds an infinity of doubt, and implies a faith. Faith in what? Perhaps in nothing; just a capacity to have faith; or if there must be faith in something, then faith in the inexorable laws that govern phenomena.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »