The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Interpretation
Marriage's true value lies in how children help adults mature and grow.
Peter De Vries highlights the idea that marriage is less about the act of having children and more about the transformative journey that parenthood offers to adults. Through the responsibilities and challenges of raising children, adults often discover deeper layers of themselves, fostering personal growth and maturity that can only be achieved through the experiences of parenting.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for a speech at a wedding, emphasizing the deeper meaning of marriage.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.
Has there not been, sometimes, this temptation to do a great deal for Christ, but not to live a great deal with Christ?
The provision of basic material needs is not sufficient to make minority groups and indigenous peoples feel they are truly part of the greater national entity. For that they have to be confident that they too have an active role to play in shaping the destiny of the state that demands their allegiance.
I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
The life of many a person could probably be changed if only someone would make him feel important.
A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.
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