No society can survive without children. The rhetoric that holds children to be our greatest national resource is true, but the re...ality is that we do little to demonstrate any conviction of its truth. Becoming a parent and being a "good," concerned, and attentive parent may be the most significant contribution any adult can make to our society--and ultimately to the gross national product and to the future of the society.... Surely, it is time to acknowledge the contribution parents make in bearing, caring for, and rearing future generations of citizens, workers, and parents--even if they share personally in the rewards of having children. Surely, parenting is a life cycle stage warranting support at its inception and as an ongoing process by a society that needs and wants children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a le...sson to man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-developm...ent, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events--marriage, children..., the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman's life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child to be concerned about is the one who is actively unhappy, [in school].... In the long run, a child's emotional developme...nt has a far greater impact on his life than his school performance or the curriculum's richness, so it is wise to do everything possible to change a situation in which a child is suffering excessively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idea of childhood as a social invention, in retrospect, is hardly credible. In the Bible, in writings of the Greeks and Romans..., and in the works of the first great educator of the modern era, Comenius, children were recognized as being both different from adults and different from one another with respect to their stages of development. To be sure, the scientific study of children and the increased length of life in modern times have enhanced our understanding of age differences, but they have always been acknowledged.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lifelong process of caregiving, is the ultimate link between caregivers of all ages. You and I are not just in a phase we will... outgrow. This is life--birth, death, and everything in between.... The care continuum is the cycle of life turning full circle in each of our lives. And what we learn when we spoon-feed our babies will echo in our ears as we feed our parents. The point is not to be done. The point is to be ready to do again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call it...self fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance--that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view,... intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »