Love quotes are a great way of getting your feelings across when you're at a loss for words. Sending your now-grown children off to school is one of those times. It's that time of year and parents everywhere are getting ready to send of their college students, if they haven't already. Here are 15 parenting quotes fit for the occasion.



1. "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." ~ Elizabeth Stone

2. "A child enters your home and for the next twenty years makes so much noise you can hardly stand it. The child departs, leaving the house so silent you think you are going mad." ~ John Andrew Holmes

3. "These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?" ~ Phyllis McGinley

4. "Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home." ~ Bill Cosby

5. "The school will teach children how to read, but the environment of the home must teach them what to read. The school can teach them how to think, but the home must teach them what to believe." ~ Charles A. Wells

6. "If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone." ~ Anne Bronte

7. "But a wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease." ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

8. "The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them." ~ Frank A. Clark

9. "Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation." ~ C. Everett Koop

10. "Whoever said it first spoke with insight and wisdom: you don't own children, you only borrow them." ~ Anne Linn

11. "Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves." ~ Ernest Dimnet

12. "Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality." ~ George Santayana

13. "The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence." ~ Denis Waitley

14. "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." ~ Mark Twain

15. "There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." ~ Graham Green

There is no stronger love in the world than the love of a parent for their child. One of the hardest, most bittersweet things a parent will do is wave goodbye as their child goes off to college. For 18 years that parent loved, cared for, sheltered and sacrificed for this child. In an instant, that child is sent off on their own. Perhaps these 15 love quotes aren't just for the children going off to school, but for the parents sending them as well.