What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good place to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.
The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.
This was his most famous speech.
A mother needs to be in the home even when the kids aren’t. A messy house sends a coded message to children: “I’m not loveable. Otherwise Mother would dust.
I'm just trying to keep things normal around the house, because there's no reason why things shouldn't be normal.
Like plowing, housework makes the ground ready for the germination of family life. The kids will not invite a teacher home if beer cans litter the living room. The family isn't likely to have breakfast together if somebody didn't remember to buy eggs, milk, or muffins. Housework maintains an orderly setting in which family life can flourish.
Even cooking at home, the difference between my wife cooking and me cooking is major. When my wife cooks, the kitchen looks like a disaster. When I cook it's completely clean and organized and it doesn't look like anyone has been cooking in there.
My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, 'Cooking is my job, and studying is your job.' I think, in retrospect, she didn't like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.
I was determined to have a spotless house when I grew up.
In the sacred precinct of that dwelling where the despotic woman wields the sceptre of fierce neatness, one treads as if he carried his life in his hands.
Unequivocally, individual human beings who live together will always have different standards of what a 'clean house' looks like.
Every house has to have rules - even 'Animal House.'
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
My house is completely organized from my closets to my drawers.
You can't have nine children and not be organized. Otherwise it just looks like Appalachia.
In big houses in which things are done properly, there is always the religious element. The diurnal cycle is observed with more feeling when there are servants to do the work.
It's not a public matter when you discipline your family.
