Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

I've grown a lot, and I'm learning every week.

I'm learning every day, and I have been since the minute I became a mom.

I want to see myself in a situation where guys want to grow, guys want to get better.

I wanted to show my maturity. The criticism I got made me grow up. It motivated me.

There's always so much to improve, no matter your age.

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age.

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling

How can we help a child change from undependable to dependable, from a mediocre student to a capable student, from someone who won't amount to very much to someone who will count for something. The answer is at once both simple and complicated: We treat a child as if he already is what we would like him to become.

The discipline learned from putting in time and effort as a child is a skill and a talent you carry with you for the rest of your life in trying to achieve goals.

Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?

Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.

The adult works to improve his environment while the child works to improve himself.

The solution is to change from the negative to the positive and one way to do that is to remember that failure is an event - it is not a person. Another way is to understand that your child might make a mistake, but the child is not a mistake

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.

Treat people the way they are and they will stay that way. Treat people the way they can become and they will become that way.

We have to get children to understand that not only do they have this incredible uniqueness, but they also have something that sometimes we forget about. They are also potentiality. They are much more undiscovered than they are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It doesn't matter where they are, they're only just beginning and the big magical trip of life is digging it all out and discovering the wonderful you.

I feel very lucky to be making good work still. The confidence of youth, or that sort of competitiveness you get when you're 22 or 23, the impatience - that's probably been tempered. Hopefully I'm slightly better company.

All children have gifts, some open them at different times.

Men are but children of a larger growth.

It is not size or age that separates children from adults. It is responsibility.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

A great coach can lead you to a place where you don't need him any more.

I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people like you who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.