The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Interpretation
Marriage's true value lies in how children help adults mature and grow.
Peter De Vries highlights the idea that marriage is less about the act of having children and more about the transformative journey that parenthood offers to adults. Through the responsibilities and challenges of raising children, adults often discover deeper layers of themselves, fostering personal growth and maturity that can only be achieved through the experiences of parenting.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for a speech at a wedding, emphasizing the deeper meaning of marriage.
We must love one another, yes, yes, that's all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other. It may be the very recognition of all men as our brothers that accounts for the sibling rivalry, and even enmity, we have toward so many of them.
I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best -- it's all they'll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money -- provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.
Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff - it is a palliative rather than a remedy.
The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.
Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes. You say sorry just for show. You live like that, you live with ghosts.
The confusing of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
I hope to have communion with the people, that is the most important thing.
I fervently believe that people shouldn't stay in bad relationships just because of some artificial rom-com notion of true love being "forever." In fact, I think that the pressure of conforming to that framework ruins-literally RUINS-a lot of people's lives.
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