Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

I listen to my mother, and that keeps me out of trouble. I’m a good son.

My mother insisted that her children read.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

The kids are old enough now – I just want to let them be kids. I don’t want to comment on them too much. They’re at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

I’m healthy as can be – not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.

I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage.

I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.

It is a very mixed blessing to be brought back from the dead.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents, and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

We had problems like all families but we had a lot of love. I was extremely loved. We always felt we had each other.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

It’s hard to improve public education – that’s clear.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.

I actually feel more of a woman because I feel like I’m being smart about my choices, and I’m putting my family first, and I’m in charge of my life and my health. I think that’s what makes a woman complete.

You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

Everything I have, my career, my success, my family, I owe to America.

OK, I have a nickname. My family calls me ‚Trey‘ because I’m William the third. My dad has the same name, which is always confusing because my dad is well known, and I’m also known.

‚Doo-wop‘ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I had been one.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

Creativity is the key to success in the future, and primary education is where teachers can bring creativity in children at that level.

My parents weren’t actors or studio executives.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You’re trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren’t very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

To the women and children, T stands for tender. To the bad guys and thugs, it stands for tough.

The reason children accept discipline from their parents is because they know their parents love them.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

These wretched babies don’t come until they are ready.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

I imagine I will be less involved in film and be focused more on family and foreign affairs.

I was very blessed to have family and friends, but particularly family, who told me I was not only all right, I was just right, so I believe that my brain is a good one, and it’s lasting me very well.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

My son is becoming me – just a silly, silly prankster guy.

My mother made me truly appreciate women.

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, some way, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home – you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

We can’t form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.

Family and friendships are two of the greatest facilitators of happiness.

We will always be a family. Always.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

When you tell a recruiter that you’re almost 300 pounds and you want to be a SEAL, it doesn’t go too well. I got hung up on a lot.

My grandpa was a preacher.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.