top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Parenting quotes
"Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Don't box your children in and tell them that everything is a sin. You'll produce either rebels, or very boring people."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Effective parenting requires being the grown up version of what you want your children to be. Why? Because example is the most compelling superpower."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This is the one thing that I learnt from my father, and I approve of it fully. Abundance is neither good nor healthy for the growth of a child's mind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In parenting patience is the greatest virtue."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Passing their toilet training is the very last thing that some adults did that has made their parents proud of them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Mothers should be very careful what type of boys and men they create, or allow to be created."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them."
Author Name
Personal Development
Explore more quotes by Ian McEwan
"Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages-he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be."
Lifestyle
"Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear."
Morality
"I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand."
Emotion
"Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes."
Truth
"While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew."
Wisdom
"I felt stifled. Everything I looked at reminded me of myself."
Self
"One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error, especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience, or whether that's even possible, interested me."
Regret
"Perhaps I'd been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don't have to comply with a request just because it's reasonable or reasonably put. Age is the great dis-obliger. You can be yourself and say no."
Wisdom
"It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity."
Psychology
"He wanted a father, and for the same reason, he wanted to be a father."
Family
bottom of page