Samuel Smiles Quotes

The best school of discipline is home. Family life is God's own method of training the young, and homes are very much as women make them.

Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.

I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

It is mother's influence during the crucial formative years that forms a child's basic character. Home is the place where a child learns faith, feels love, and thereby learns from mother's loving example to choose righteousness.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.

You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example.

Good homes are still the best source of good humans.

As parents, we should remember that our lives may be the book from the family library which the children most treasure. Are our examples worthy of emulation? Do we live in such a way that a son or a daughter may say, ‘I want to follow my dad,’ or ‘I want to be like my mother’? Unlike the book on the library shelf, the covers of which shield its contents, our lives cannot be closed. Parents, we truly are an open book in the library of learning of our homes.

Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.

Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example.

I have always believed. I grew up, you know, my parents were a good Christian people. They showed us love in the home.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

The greatest work in all the world is the building of men and women of character. Without character there is not much that is worthwhile.

Home life, home teaching, parental guidance is the panacea for all the ailments, a cure for all diseases, a remedy for all problems.

There’s more time spent on teaching kids about recycling than on character development in the American schools.

In the homes of America are born the children of America; and from them go out into American life, American men and women. They go out with the stamp of these homes upon them; and only as these homes are what they should be, will they be what they should be.

True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.

A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character.

Be what you wish your children to be. Parents have perpetuated by precept and example their own stamp of character to their posterity.

Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.

The real property that a parent can transmit to all equally is his or her character and educational facilities.

Christianity is not so much the advent of a better doctrine as of a perfect character.

If joy and peace and rewards were instantaneously given the doer of good, there would be no evil-all would do good but not because of the rightness of doing good. There would be no test of strength, no development of character, no growth of powers, no free agency, only satanic controls.