Silence Is Better

Children complicate life, but so sweetly that they should serve to give the worker fresh courage rather than to lessen his resources.  The little ones take much of you, and what good would they be if they did not now and then tease and tax you?  But they hearten you just as much, and perhaps more;  they can heighten your inspiration by mingling joy with it;  they give you a love-lit reflection of nature and of man and thus defend you against the abstract; they bring you back to the real, about which their questioning eyes are waiting for an exact commentary from you.  Their pure faces preach integrity, that sister of knowledge; and does not their readiness to believe, to hope, to have great dreams, and to expect everything from the fatherhood that guides them — does not this uplift you also, you man of thought, and give you a motive for hope?  You can see an image of God and a sign of our immortal destiny in this image of the future.

– A.G. Sertillanges