Mark Twain Quotes

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.

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.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

Everyone of us plays 'tapes' from our parents until we die. That's why it's so important to talk good values to your child

Father and Mother are apostles, bishops and priests to their children, for it is they who make them acquainted with the gospel.

If you would be holy, instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you.

So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.

If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.

I think there is a lot to be said for the respect that our parents had for children, and for my brothers and sisters and me at a very young age, and for exposing them to the world and what's out there.

Train our children to love God.

My grandparents knew it was important that I understood Christianity and the Bible. But they never took me to church; they sent me to church.

Children learn a lot from what their parents say. But they learn a lot more from what their parents do.

One of the things that I learned at a very young age is the power of a parent's words to their children.

For me it is important that children be children. My parents felt exactly the same about me.

So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'

Upon the shoulders of you mothers rests; in a great measure, the responsibility of correctly developing the mental and moral powers of the rising generation...I have often said it is the mother who forms the mind of the child. Take men anywhere, at sea, sinking with their ship, dying in battle, lying down in death almost under any circumstances, and the last thing they think if, the last word they say is "mother." Such is the influence of woman.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

If you wish your children to be Christians you must really take the trouble to be Christian yourselves. Those are the only terms upon which the home will work the gracious miracle.

Children are arrows in a quiver, and they are to be trained as missionaries and shot at the Devil.

The greatest responsibility is your children. If my children turned out badly, I'd feel that nothing I had done was worthwhile.

Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of and our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child.

In our family, at this point,[Sunday School] its not a choice for my kids. It's a duty for us as parents to give them faith as a foundation and hope that when they bemuse older teens and young adults they will choose the same thing for themselves.

The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents.

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

As the fathers live, so the children play.