History repeats itself, but in such cunning disguise that we never detect the resemblance until the damage is done.

And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the omnipotence or the wisdom of the parent.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, his is also one who is permanently disappointed in the future.

The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones - which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.