86 Inspirational Quotes For Parents

Parenting is a journey filled with incredible joys, challenges, and countless unforgettable moments. Whether you’re juggling the rewards of nurturing little minds or navigating the complexities of guiding teenagers, every parent needs a touch of inspiration to keep moving forward. In this spirit, we’ve curated a collection of the top 86 inspirational quotes for parents. These quotes are not just words; they are reminders of the profound impact you have on your children’s lives and the boundless love that fuels your journey. Dive in, find your inspiration, and take heart in knowing that you are not alone in this beautiful adventure called parenting.

1. “Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” - Oscar Wilde

3. “When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” - John Steinbeck

4. “My parents are going to kill me!""That seems rather harsh...” - Garth Nix

5. “Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street. ” - Neil Gaiman

6. “You'll stay with me?'Until the very end,' said James.” - J. K. Rowling

7. “My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.” - Anne Fadiman

8. “If you surround yourself with the good and righteous, they can only raise you up. If you surround yourself with the others, they will drag you down into the doldrums of mediocrity, and they will keep you there, but only as long as you permit it.” - Mark Glamack

9. “I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop,don't do it--she's the wrong woman,he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do,you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body,his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it” - Sharon Olds

10. “When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.” - Rodney Dangerfield

11. “It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.” - Roald Dahl

12. “Have times really changed? Don't we today, as always, love our children and want them to live righteously? Don't we today, as always, need God's divine protecting care? Don't we today, as always, continue to be at his mercy and in his debt for the very life he has given us? ” - Thomas S. Monson

13. “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.” - Charles Taylor

14. “For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.” - E.M. Forster

15. “That first pregnancy is a long sea journey to a country where you don't know the language, where land is in sight for such a long time that after a while it's just the horizon - and then one day birds wheel over that dark shape and it's suddenly close, and all you can do is hope like hell that you've had the right shots. ” - Emily Perkins

16. “As I would soon learn myself, cleaning up what a parent leaves behind stirs up dust, both literal and metaphorical. It dredges up memories. You feel like you’re a kid again, poking around in your parents’ closet, only this time there’s no chance of getting in trouble, so you don’t have to be so sure that everything gets put back exactly where it was before you did your poking around. Still, you hope to find something, or maybe you fear finding something, that will completely change your conception of the parent you thought you knew.” - Roz Chast

17. “The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life.” - Steve Maraboli

18. “The VoiceThere is a voice inside of youThat whispers all day long,"I feel this is right for me,I know that this is wrong."No teacher, preacher, parent, friendOr wise man can decideWhat's right for you--just listen toThe voice that speaks inside.” - Shel Silverstein

19. “Lolly nods. "Though when is the right time for that? I asked her for a new sports bra since I outgrew my last one and she looked at me as if I'd just asked her to buy me a pony.” - Robin Epstein

20. “My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.” - Michael Palin

21. “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.” - Jane Austen

22. “When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.” - Jude Watson

23. “Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.” - Chuck Palahniuk

24. “I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.” - Sherman Alexie

25. “Little tree filled his lungs with the white airness of the night, as if he were going to fly. The living voice of his parents. Elisha's eyes. These were reasons enough to set off on another adventure.Reasons to be Toby Lolness again.” - Timothee de Fombelle

26. “I respect you as my king, and I respect you as my father, but I do not respect you as a man!” - Rebecca McKinsey

27. “It was as if something snapped in two deep inside me. My parents-- the people I’d loved the most in the world, the ones I’d always told all my secrets to, the ones I’d wanted to hide with far away from the rest of the world. They had lied, and I couldn’t imagine why. It couldn’t possibly matter why.” - Claudia Gray

28. “Tell me why.” My voice shook. “Tell me right now.” - Claudia Gray

29. “Parenthood...It's about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last.” - Peter Krause (Parenthood)

30. “Athletes are born winners, there not born loosers, and the sooner you understand this, the faster you can take on a winning attitude and become sucessful in life.” - Charles R. Sledge Jr.

31. “A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

32. “No matter how far we come, our parents are always in us.” - Brad Meltzer

33. “She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.” - Brad Meltzer

34. “They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?” - Richard Ford

35. “sodoyouthinkyoucouldtrustmetogotothedancetonight?" she blurted before losing her nerve. Viktor and Viveka exchanged a quick glance.Are they considering it? They are! They trust -"No," they said together. Frankie resisted the urge to spark. Or scream. Or threaten to go on a charging strike. She had prepared herself for this. It had always been a possibility. That's why she'd read 'Acting For Young Actors: The Ultimate Teenage Guide' by Mary Lou Belli and Dihah Lenney. So she could act like she understood their rejection. Act like she accepted it. And act like she would return to her room with grace. "Well, thanks for hearing me out," she said, kissing them on the cheeks and skipping off to bed. "Good night.""Good night?" Viktor responded. "That's it? No argument?""No argument," Frankie said with a sweet smile. "You have to see this punishment through or you're not teaching me anything. I get it.""O-kay." Viktor returned to his medical journal, shaking his head as if he couldn't quite believe what he was hearing."We love you." Viveka blew another kiss."I love you, too." Frankie blew two back.Time for Plan B.” - Lisi Harrison

36. “It never gets easier, missing you. And sometimes I wonder if it ever will.” - Heather Brewer

37. “It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” - Maya Angelou

38. “An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.” - Raymond S. Moore

39. “Parents should also question much of the contemporary emphasis on special materials and equipment for learning in a child's environment. A clutter of toys can be more confusing than satisfying to a child. On the other hand, natural situations, with opportunieties to explore, seldom overstimulate or trouble a small child. Furthermore, most children will find greater satisfaction and demonsstrate greater learning from things they make and do with their parents or other people than from elaborate toys or learning materials. And there is no substitute for solitude - in the sandpile, mud puddle, or play area - for a yound child to work out his own fantasies. Yet this privilege is often denied in our anxiety to institutionalize children.” - Raymond S. Moore

40. “I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.” - Craig Ferguson

41. “Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different” - Tana French

42. “There’s no winning arguments with your parents, so why get all pumped up over them? It is way better to dive down and get out of the way than it is to get clobbered by some parental tidal wave.” - Wendelin Van Draanen

43. “Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.” - Jonathan Franzen

44. “Parents shouldn't leave their kids unless —unless they've got to.” - J.K. Rowling

45. “If I had received good instruction as a child I would be with my family today and at peace with my neighbors. I hope and pray that all you parents in the sound of my voice will train up your children in the way they should go.” - Charles Portis

46. “I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.” - Bill Bryson

47. “For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.” - William S. Burroughs

48. “but my dad said it was no excuse."But I love him!" I had never seen my sister cry that much."No, you don't.""I hate you!""No, you don't." My dad can be very calm sometimes."He's my whole world.""Don't ever say that about anyone again. Not even me." That was my mom.” - Stephen Chbosky

49. “Whether our caretaker was our mom, dad, uncle, aunt, grandparent, foster parent, or sibling, our blueprint of what a relationship is supposed to look like is drafted by what we observed from our caretaker’s relationship. If our caretaker took their significant other back multiple times, made excuses for their actions, helped them battle demons, turned a blind eye to their infidelity, or moved from one relationship to the next, that is what we know. Their behavior becomes our very own model of what a relationship is supposed to look like and determines what we will expect from our own partners.” - Kristen Crockett

50. “The reality is that most of us communicate the same way that we grew up. That communication style becomes our normal way of dealing with issues, our blueprint for communication. It’s what we know and pass on to our own children. We either become our childhood or we make a conscious choice to change it.” - Kristen Crockett

51. “The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.” - George Bernard Shaw

52. “Our parents prayer is the most beautiful poetry and expectations” - Aditia Rinaldi

53. “I've tried to teach what I learned all those years in my mother and father's house, all those things I didn't realize I was learning and that I never knew I'd be so grateful for. When you have love and it's proffered every day in a kind of tender, yet stern insistence and even reckless laughter, when it is given to you and you accept it in life as a thing as natural as rain or snow, or the littler of leaves in fall, you can't help but take it for granted. For a bewildered while you incorrectly understand that the world has given you this becuase it's there in equal measure, everywhere. You never knowuntil it's too late to do anything about it, how seet the effort is: how lasting the human will to love can be in the breast of people who want to make it for you, who want to give it to you, without calculating what's in it fo them, without thinking at all of what it will mean when you grow to full adulthood, see the world as it is, and forget to mention what you have been given.Ever day of my grown-up life, I have wanted to do what my parents did. I have wanted to widen the province of love and weaken hate and bitterness in the hearts of my children. And I've done these things because of what I got from my family, all those lovely years when I was growing up, being loved and cherished and, unbeknown to me, and in the best way, honored, for myself.” - Marian Wright Edelman

54. “Parents have to instill the right principles in their children, but then it's up to the children to live up to those principles.” - Mary Lydon Simonsen

55. “But I'm learning it's human nature to want the things you can't have. What changes is how you go about pursuing the things you want. When you're a little kid and you're told no, you scream and throw a temper tantrum. When you're a teenager and your parents tell you no, you're old enough to internalize your temper tantrum. But you're smarter and you're sneakier this time around. So you nod and act like you care when they say no, when they tell you who you can be friends with, when they say the know what's best. But then you go behind their backs to do it anyway. Because at some point, you need to start calling the shots. At some point, you need to start believing you know whats best. Or, I thought with a smile, you just stop asking for their permission in the first place.” - Katie Kacvinsky

56. “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.” - Jim Morrison

57. “Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud....” - Gerry Spence

58. “She has to live, Eliott. I owe her a lifetime of apologies.”“Sometimes I think that’s all we owe our parents.” - Bethany Griffin

59. “I've been alone since my mom met Scott.He sucked the nectar from her heartlike a famished butterfly. No nurture,no nourishment left for Kristina.A vacation is a poor substitutefor love.” - Ellen Hopkins

60. “I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.” - Johann Hari

61. “You're not supposed to laugh at your own father. Ever.” - Jeannette Walls

62. “If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can't buy you clothes, they're so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you--if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.If you have two parents who love you? You have won life's Lotto.If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.It's not ideal because it's harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that's all.” - Augusten Burroughs

63. “That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.” - J.X. Burros

64. “Tatlo ang magulang ng henerasyon natin. Ang tatay, ang nanay, at ang mga patalastas o media. Kaya kung mahina yung dalawang nauna, naagawan sila ng ikatlo sa pagpapalaki sa bata.” - Bob Ong

65. “I tell him about ... Jack and Annabel, smart and ready and I'm wondering where all that smart comes from and I figure some from parents, some from school, and some from a place inside you.” - Steven Herrick

66. “Try to find the nicest phrases and words while talking to your parents and be creative because whatever you say, it is not enough” - د.عبدالكريم بكّار

67. “How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years.” - W. Somerset Maugham

68. “He winced at her efforts to mollify him. Why didn't she say she was disgusted with his behaviour, with his long absence, his infrequent superficial letters? And if she did say it - would he defend himself? Would he give reasons, try to explain how meaningless every endeavour seemed to him? No. For then she would start crying again, he would tell her to stop being silly, she would ask for details, and he would tell her to mind her own business.” - Rohinton Mistry

69. “I have heard that, with some persons, temperance – that is, moderation – is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself – which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.” - Anne Brontë

70. “After having so nobly disentangled themselves from the shackles of Parental Authority, by a Clandestine Marriage, they were determined never to forfeit the good opinion they had gained in the World, in so doing, by accepting any proposals of reconciliation that might be offered them by their Fathers – to their farther trial of their noble independence however they never were exposed.” - Jane Austen

71. “It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder, and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge.” - Phyllis Diller

72. “It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro

73. “When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper- "That man was once someone's little boy.” - Blake Crouch

74. “So much is asked of parents, and so little is given.” - Virginia Satir

75. “Never feel like you need to visit him, ever?" "I see him every morning in the mirror. I think of him as the ghost version of me. And who needs to visit your own ghost?” - Adele Griffin

76. “On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.” - Neal Shusterman

77. “I couldn't make myself imagine Dad holding some creamy-faced baby, cooing at it, telling it he loved it. Taking it to baseball games. Living some life he'd probably consider his 'real life,' the one he deserved rather than the one he got.” - Jennifer Brown

78. “We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reached out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.” - Jennifer Brown

79. “It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream — so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.” - Bill Bryson

80. “I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?” - Melina Marchetta

81. “Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a teenager’s mind is too underdeveloped to understand love, to know if it’s ‘real’ or not.That's completely asinine.The truth is that adults love in different ways, not the only way.” - J.A. Redmerski

82. “As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.” - Louise Gluck

83. “The problem with parents is that they're adults.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

84. “First, I'm not getting married, so you can forget the wife. Second, if I was insane enough to get married, I wouldn't have kids. Third, if I was insane enough to get married and have kids, it would be a cold day in hell I'd let you babysit.” - Jennifer Crusie

85. “Some of the things I hated my parents for when I was younger are the same things I love my parents for now that I'm older.” - Steve Maraboli

86. “The ToysMy little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise, Having my law the seventh time disobey'd, I struck him, and dismiss'd With hard words and unkiss'd,—His Mother, who was patient, being dead. Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep, I visited his bed, But found him slumbering deep, With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet From his late sobbing wet. And I, with moan, Kissing away his tears, left others of my own; For, on a table drawn beside his head, He had put, within his reach, A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone, A piece of glass abraded by the beach, And six or seven shells, A bottle with bluebells, And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, To comfort his sad heart. So when that night I pray'd To God, I wept, and said: Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath, Not vexing Thee in death, And Thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, 'I will be sorry for their childishness.” - Coventry Patmore