Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.

Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.

The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child-raising is not the child but the parent.

. . . in the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.

Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don't want to hurt one another's feelings, and they don't try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another.

The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.