This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Better | Children | Hope | Man | Possessions |
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness…. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it…. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
Change | Children | Experience | Infancy | Instinct | Nothing | Past | Progress |
So it is that men sigh on, not knowing what the soul wants, but only that it needs something. Our yearnings are homesickness for heaven. Our sighings are sighings for God, just as children that cry themselves asleep away from home, and sob in their slumber, not knowing that they sob for their parents. The soul's inarticulate moanings are the affections yearning for the Infinite, and having no one to tell them what it is that ails them.
Children | God | Heaven | Knowing | Men | Parents | Soul | Wants | Yearnings |
It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct.
Children | Conduct | Consequences | Experience | Parents |
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
We should treat our minds as innocent and ingenious children whose guardians we are - be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.
Many men do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do the flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing.
Children | Men | Principles |
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. And the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.
Books | Children | Excitement | Family | Knowledge | Love | Man | Means | Mind | Reading | Right | Wrong | Learn |
When you have your own children you will understand your obligation to your parents.
Children | Obligation | Parents | Will | Understand |
Jesse Jackson, fully Jesse Louis Jackson
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
People should be free to find or make for themselves the kind of educational experiences they want their children to have.