Happy Grandparents Day! Enjoy our Favorite Grandparent Quotes

Authors and actors, comedians and commentators, professionals and presidents share their thoughts about grandparents in these funny and poignant quotes. Cascade Patch selected these from a more comprehensive list on the Grandparents.com website  in honor of National Grandparents Day, Sunday, Sept. 9: (Add your photos of your Grandparents too!)

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent — that is to triumph over old age."

Dave Barry

"The best babysitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida."

Marjory Barslow-Greenbie

"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature / But beautiful old people are works of art."

Teresa Bloomingdale

"If your baby is 'beautiful and perfect, never cries or fusses, sleeps on schedule and burps on demand, an angel all the time,' you're the grandma."

Rachel Carson

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

Jimmy Carter

"Because (grandparents) are usually free to love and guide and befriend the young without having to take daily responsibility for them, they can often reach out past pride and fear of failure and close the space between generations."

Bill Cosby

"What is it about grandparents that is so lovely? I'd like to say that grandparents are God's gifts to children. And if they can but see, hear and feel what these people have to give, they can mature at a fast rate."

Marcy DeMaree

"Grandma always made you feel she had been waiting to see just you all day and now the day was complete."

Mary Mapes Dodge

"Grandma told me all about it, / Told me so I couldn't doubt it, / How she danced, my grandma danced; long ago...."

John Donne

"No spring, nor summer hath such grace. As I have seen in one autumnal face."

Edward H. Dreschnack

"Just about the time a woman thinks her work is done, she becomes a grandmother."

 Ralph Ellison

"I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body."

Betty Ford

"Holding these babies in my arms makes me realize the miracle my husband and I began."

Robert Fulghum

"I love this child. Red-haired — patient and gentle like her mother — fey and funny like her father. When she giggles I can hear him when he and I were young. I am part of this child. It may be only because we share genes and that therefore smell familiar to each other.... It may be that a part of me lives in her in some important way.... But for now, it’s jelly beans and 'Old MacDonald' that unite us."

Ruth Goode

"Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends — and hardly ever our own grown children."

Alex Haley

"Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children."

Linda Henley

"If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn't have given us grandmothers."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Blood is a destiny. One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry."

Samuel Johnson

"Whatever is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity."

Joseph Joubert

"Life is a country that the old have seen, and lived in. Those who have to travel through it can only learn the way from them."

Helen Ketchum

"Grandmothers are voices of the past and role models of the present. Grandmothers open the doors to the future."

Arthur Kornhaber, M.D.

"If grandmas hadn’t existed, kids would have inevitably invented them."

Doug Larson

"The idea that no one is perfect is a view most commonly held by people with no grandchildren."

Paul Linden

"Something magical happens when parents turns into grandparents. Their attitude changes from "money-doesn't-grow-on-trees" to spending it like it does."

Sophia Loren

"There is a fountain of youth: It is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age."

Horace Mann

"It would be more honourable to our distinguished ancestors to praise them in words less, but in deeds to imitate them more."

Don Marquis

"In order not to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent."

Christopher Morley

"It is as grandmothers that our mothers come into the fullness of their grace."

Charles and Ann Morse

"The history of our grandparents is remembered not with rose petals but in the laughter and tears of their children and their children's children. It is into us that the lives of grandparents have gone. It is in us that their history becomes a future."

Ogden Nash

"When grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window."

F. W. Nietzsche

"A man's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play."

Henry Old Coyote

"The feeling of grandparents for their grandchildren can be expressed this way: “Our children are dear to us; but when we have grandchildren, they seem to be more dear than our children were."

Gene Perret

"Do you know why grandchildren are always so full of energy? They suck it out of their grandparents."

"On the seventh day God rested. His grandchildren must have been out of town."

"Grandparents are there to help the child get into mischief they haven't thought of yet."

"Two things I dislike about my granddaughter — when she won't take her afternoon nap, and when she won't let me take mine."

"Grandchildren: the only people who can get more out of you than the IRS."

"You're more trouble than the children are" is the greatest compliment a grandparent can receive."

Robert L Rice, M.D.

"A friend of mine was asked how she liked having her first great-grandchild. 'It was wonderful,' she replied, 'until I suddenly realized that I was the mother of a grandfather!'"

Andy Rooney

"Elephants and grandchildren never forget."

Rita Rudner

"Have children while your parents are still young enough to take care of them.

Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish, Suquamish and allied Indian tribes

"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mothers. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."

Will Shriner

"I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather — not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car."

Phyllis Theroux

"We should all have one person who knows how to bless us despite the evidence, Grandmother was that person to me."

Liv Ullmann

"Soon I will be an old, white-haired lady, into whose lap someone places a baby, saying, 'Smile, Grandma!' — I, who myself so recently was photographed on my grandmother's lap."

Gore Vidal

"Never have children, only grandchildren."

Mary H. Waldrip

"Grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old."

John Wooden

"Our land is everything to us.... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives."

Aby Yahya

"Look, how they scold me for all my loving and tippling, now that the silvery edges shine forth from my brow!"

Henny Youngman

"My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle."

 Unknown

"Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting."

"Grandmas never run out of hugs or cookies."

"Grandmas hold our tiny hands for just a little while, but our hearts forever."

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

"Grandmother-grandchild relationships are simple. Grandmas are short on criticism and long on love."

"The best place to be when you're sad is Grandpa's lap."

"No cowboy was ever faster on the draw than a grandparent pulling a baby picture out of a wallet."

"My granddaughter came to spend a few weeks with me, and I decided to teach her to sew. After I had gone through a lengthy explanation of how to thread the machine, she stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and said in disbelief, 'You mean you can do all that, but you can't play my Game Boy?'"

"My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, 'Gramma, do you know how you and God are alike?' I mentally polished my halo while I asked, 'No, how are we alike?' 'You're both old,' he replied.