Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Quotes

The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

I think it is so important to pass down knowledge and information to younger generations.

The best gift from a father to his child is Education and Upbringing.

When you hold your baby in your arms the first time, and you think of all the things you can say and do to influence him, it's a tremendous responsibility. What you do with him can influence not only him, but everyone he meets and not for a day or a month or a year but for time and eternity.

Kids are smart. Knowledge is power. Let them figure things out. Don't turn into that grown-up who they won't come to.

All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

I love being the person my kids depend on to learn. Everything they learn, for the most part, comes from you - how they treat people, how they look at the world, how they process things. I love being that example for them, just like my parents were for me.

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

Kids would never care about going to school unless your mama and daddy instilled into your head and explained to you that you need this thing to live.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Your son and your daughter needs an excellent father more than an excellent college.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.

I want the privilege of guiding the arrows of my children and giving them the exhortations that can shoot them into the high place.

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

Give me a child for the first 7 years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.

My dad was a great business guy, and he always taught us that his business acumen would put his workers' kids through school, and their great artistry... would put my brothers and me through school.

Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.

I saw my dad doing it and thought to myself, 'I can do that.' I would be backstage watching him and running around the country with him singing to children. He would sing songs that taught children really good morals: like, 'Teaching Peace' was a song he used to sing to kids a lot.

My dad did a great job passing on what he learned from his career.