Samuel Smiles Quotes

A mother's example sketches the outline of her child's character.

Instruction, and advice, and commands will profit little, unless they are backed up by the pattern of your own life. Your children will never believe you are in earnest, and really wish them to obey you, so long as your actions contradict your counsel... Think not your children will practise what they do not see you do. You are their model picture, and they will copy what you are... will seldom learn habits which they see you despise, or walk in paths in which you do not walk yourself.

We must become the people we want our children to be.

The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.

Children learn a lot from what their parents say. But they learn a lot more from what their parents do.

A lot of things I try to instill in my children comes off of what I've learned from my parents. First of all, you have to lead by example. You can't say one thing and behave another way. Kids learn more from watching you in life than what you say to them. So I try to be the best example I can be to them.

Was it Gorky who had said, "If your children are no better than you are, you have fathered them in vain, indeed you have lived in vain".

What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.

As the fathers live, so the children play.

Be what you wish your children to be. Parents have perpetuated by precept and example their own stamp of character to their posterity.

To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while. Your children need your presence more than your presents.

If thou desire to see thy child virtuous, let him not see his father's vices: thou canst not rebuke that in them, that they behold practised in thee; till reason be ripe, examples direct more than precepts: such as thy behaviour is before thy children's faces, such commonly is theirs behind their parents' backs.

Children pay more attention to what you do than to what you say.

I love being the person my kids depend on to learn. Everything they learn, for the most part, comes from you - how they treat people, how they look at the world, how they process things. I love being that example for them, just like my parents were for me.

My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

Parents should be the most important examples for their children.

If you have children, you know you're responsible for somebody. You realize you are being imitated; your belief systems and priorities have a direct influence on these children, who are like flowers in a garden.

If children are expected to be honest, parents must be honest. If children are expected to be virtuous, parents must be virtuous. If you expect your children to be honorable, you must be honorable.

It has become an accepted tenet that kids will rarely listen to their parents but seldom fail to imitate them. Communicating the message has never been a good substitute for 'showing up' and embodying the message.

I never asked my children to do something I didn't show them that I could also do.

As parents, we should remember that our lives may be the book from the family library which the children most treasure. Are our examples worthy of emulation? Do we live in such a way that a son or a daughter may say, ‘I want to follow my dad,’ or ‘I want to be like my mother’? Unlike the book on the library shelf, the covers of which shield its contents, our lives cannot be closed. Parents, we truly are an open book in the library of learning of our homes.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

Infants manners are moulded more by the example of Parents, then by stars at their nativities.

The footsteps a child follows are most likely to be the ones his parents thought they covered up.

...the love, respect, and confidence of my children was the sweetest reward I could receive for my efforts to be the woman I would have them copy.