Relationships and Family

Deep in the cavern of the infant’s breast / The father’s nature lurks, and lives anew.

With him for a sire and her for a dam, / What should I be but just what I am?

In a brief space the generations of living beings are changed and like runners pass on the torches of life.

We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; / Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,— / Now green in youth, now withering on the ground; / Another race the following spring supplies: / They fall successive, and successive rise.

Only mothers can think of the future—because they give birth to it in their children.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

When brothers agfee, no fortress is so strong as their common life.

A man finds room in the few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don’t like her daughter to resemble her in.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?"

There was no room in God’s army for the coward heart, no crown awaiting him who put mother or father, sister or brother, sweetheart or friend above God’s will. Let the church cry amen to this!

When once the young heart of a maiden is stolen, / The maiden herself will steal after it soon.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless thy win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

Do not let any sweet-talking woman beguile your good sense / with the fascinations of her shape. It’s your barn she’s after.

That child whose mother has never smiled upon him is worthy neither of the table of the gods nor the couch of the goddesses.

High people, Sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors'.

The youth of America is their oldest tradition.

Happy the man who, far away from business, like the race of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay.