Our basic ideas about how to parent are encrusted with deeply felt emotions and many myths. One of the myths of parenting is that ...it is always fun and games, joy and delight. Everyone who has been a parent will testify that it is also anxiety, strife, frustration, and even hostility. Thus most major parenting- education formats deal with parental emotions and attitudes and, to a greater or lesser extent, advocate that the emotional component is more important than the knowledge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[T]his free and easy old-bachelor sort of life is quite full of fun and jollity. Pease and myself room together; and everything li...ke order and neatness is banished from our presence as a nuisance--old letters and old boots and shoes, duds clean and duds dirty, books and newspapers, tooth-brushes, shoe-brushes, and clothes-brushes, all heaped together on chairs, settees, etc., in dusty and "most admired confusion." Now, what is there imaginable in clean, tidy private life equal to this?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a small child there is no division between playing and learning; between the things he or she does "just for fun" and things t...hat are "educational." The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've always had the notion that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have f...un again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give me Catholicism every time. Father Cheeryble with his thurible; Father Chatterjee with his liturgy. What fun they have with al...l their charades and conundrums! If it weren't for the Christianity they insist on mixing in with it, I'd be converted tomorrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »