John Adams Quotes

It is never too early to try and plant [good principles] in a child, and never too late to cultivate them in the most neglected person.

Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature, this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.

To gain the spiritual ascendancy over ourselves, and the influences with which we are surrounded, through a rigid course of self-discipline, is our first consideration, it is our first labor, before we can pave the way for our children to grow up without sin unto salvation.

I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and sense of responsibility with or without religion.

The fundamental purpose of schools is to grow adults.

Parenting makes us better in so many regards.

I've got two small kids. I want to make sure they grow up to be good people. Do they treat people well? Are they kind?

I've always been a good person, but I wanna be, like, the best person.

I don't think that one should beat himself or herself over the head if immediately you're not like Jesus Christ or, you know, Gandhi or whoever. But I think the idea is to... to look at those examples and try to... try to operate in a way that every day you live or every interaction you have pushes you further along to operating with that mindset.

We all have to get better as human beings and that's something you can't really get away from.

What I desire most in my life is to become a better person. I genuinely want to be good.

Growing up a good person, it's a lot harder than you'd think.

I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence - you know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop - the idea that we're going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.

Try to be a better person everyday.

I'm not raising the children, I'm raising the grown ups that they're going to be.

Virtue depends partly upon training and partly upon practice; you must learn first, and then strengthen your learning by actions.

People aren't born with kindness, it grows with them.

Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end; Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise, Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice.

We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.

Remember, the goal is not to raise great kids; it's to raise kids who become great adults.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

... wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity.

Whilst that the childe is young, let him be instructed in vertue and lytterature.

Let a man begin in earnest with "I ought," and he will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with "I will." Let him force himself to abound in all small offices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all these for God's sake. By and by he will feel them become the habit of his soul.

Raise children who do the right things for the right reasons.