Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
Ivan TurgenevRead
That's what children are for—that their parents may not be bored.
Interpretation
Children bring joy and activity to their parents' lives, preventing boredom.
Ivan Turgenev humorously captures the essence of parenting by stating that children are meant to engage their parents, suggesting that the energy and unpredictability of children provide constant entertainment and prevent monotony in adult life. This perspective highlights the significance of the family dynamic and the joy that children can bring to their parents' existence.
In practice
This quote can be used during a family gathering to highlight the joy of parenting.
Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
So many memories and so little worth remembering, and in front of me - a long, long road without a goal.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.
Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!
Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.
My mother never watched me train in Romania. She wasn't allowed, it just wasn't done back then. My training was paid for by the government. My parents were not at the Olympics with me, either. I never expected them to be.
I told them [the producers] I couldn't compound the lie that Black fathers don't care about their children. I was proud of the family life I was able to introduce to television.
It's the most terrifying day of your life, the day the first one is born. Your life, as you know it, is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you'll ever meet in your life.
I am the product of the sustained indignation of a branded grandfather, the militant protest of my grandmother, the disciplined resentment of my father and mother, and the power of the mass action of the church.
I'm a 21st-century kid trapped in a 19th-century family.
Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.
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