Our need for certainty in an endeavor as uncertain as raising children makes explicit ‚how-to-parent‘ strategies both seductive and dangerous.

The woman that deliberates is lost.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it’s very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

A lot of preachers‘ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Part of the core information that I’ve been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous.

Ultimately this issue is on us. We’re the ones who make the decisions about what our kids eat.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The great thing about having a bunch of kids is they just remind you that you’re the person who takes them to go poop!

I don’t let a lot of reporters meet my children.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.

First and foremost, we need to be the adults we want our children to be. We should watch our own gossiping and anger. We should model the kindness we want to see.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

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.

In this quest to seek and find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president, but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.

I’m dying to be a great dad one day, whenever that day comes.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

I don’t have all the answers.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

There’s nothing better than having a baby. I’ve always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed, and it’s true… I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.

I want to marry Arline because I love her – which means I want to take care of her. That is all there is to it. I want to take care of her. I am anxious for the responsibilities and uncertainties of taking care of the girl I love.

We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

Once you have six children, you’re committed.

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

Children make your life important.

My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about – having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

There’s no point in making predictions. It’s not worth speculating because nothing is set in stone and things change all the time in football. Today there are opportunities that no one knows if they will come round again in the future.

I love being a dad. I just love it.

I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

When I tell a child something the first time, I’m nice. The 15th time, I start to get aggravated.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I’d wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, ‚You’re going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.‘

I have ‚Parents‘ magazine in my home.

He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.

Being a kid’s not easy. You’re transforming and becoming a human being. At some point, you have everyone taking care of you, and then, all of a sudden, you’re out in the world.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Too many people treat parenting like it’s the 20th item on their to-do list.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

If I were a woman, I would love to have lots of kids. But for men, I don’t believe in it.

Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

I really want to love somebody. I do. I just don’t know if it’s possible forever and ever.

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

While I believed deeply in my husband’s vision for this country… and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President… like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

I’m very careful about saying who would and wouldn’t go to heaven. I don’t know.