Family & parents quotes, explained

The opening of the poem that shaped the modern American Santa Claus: a jolly, round St. Nicholas who arrives on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer and comes down the chimney.

Howe called on mothers everywhere to unite and refuse to let their sons be sent to kill other mothers' sons. Her Mother's Day was a day of protest for peace.

Family ties are stronger than any other bond, so relatives should stand by each other first.

Jo March grumbles that Christmas is ruined because the family is too poor for gifts. The rest of the chapter shows the sisters discovering that giving to others makes the day.

Tiny Tim, a sick little boy from a poor family, asks God's blessing on everyone at the Christmas table. Dickens ends the whole book with it, turning a child's grace into a blessing on the reader.

Part of a poem praising a wise, hard-working, generous woman. Her children and husband honor her because her life has blessed them.

One of the Ten Commandments: treat your parents with respect and care. It is the first commandment that comes with a promise, a long life in the land.

Telemachus, whose father Odysseus left for war when he was a baby, says he has only his mother's word for who his father is. No child can be completely sure.

A joke turned into a proverb: even a father may not truly know his child. Shakespeare reverses the older saying that it is a wise child who knows its own father.

Talking with her mother after Beth's death, Jo says no one loves you like a mother, while admitting she is starting to long for other kinds of love too.

Don't borrow money and don't lend it, because a loan can cost you both the money and the friend, and borrowing makes you careless with what you have.

The person we are as children shapes the adult we become. Wordsworth hopes his grown-up self will keep the wonder he felt as a child seeing a rainbow.

Mothers shape the next generation, so their influence on the world is greater than any king's or general's. The poem praises motherhood as the strongest force for good.

The habits and values children learn early stay with them for life, so guide them well while they are young.

A teenager thinks his father knows nothing. A few years later, grown up, he realizes his father was wise all along. The joke is that it was the son who changed.

A promise of total loyalty: wherever you go, I go; your people will be my people, and your God my God.

Replying to an eight-year-old who asked if Santa was real, Church argued that love, generosity and wonder are real even though no one can see them, and that Santa Claus is real in the same way.

Parents bring children into the world and love them, but do not own them. Children have their own thoughts and their own future, and a parent's job is to send them forward, like a bow sending an arrow.