Good morning and Happy Wednesday! I hope that your week is peaceful and productive so far. Welcome to another installment of Wisdom Wednesday. Last week’s virtue was forgiveness. This week’s virtue is respect.

One of the most essential virtues you can teach your children is the virtue of respect. Coaching children to be respectful is not as complicated as it appears. The most important way to teach respect is to demonstrate respect for yourself and others.

Respect is a mind-set. It is an appreciation for others by treating them with due decorum. Respect, unlike school subjects, is an intangible notion that might be difficult to teach if you do not have respect for yourself and others around you. The best way to teach respect is to show respect. When children experiences respect, they understand how it feels and initiate understanding of the importance of respect.

10 Wisdom Wednesday Quotes: Respect

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”—Lao Tzu
“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it – whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.”― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“Friendship is selfless love, care, respect, and honor not a profitable opportunity.”― Santosh Kalwar
“The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.”—Benjamin Franklin
“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”—Salvador Dali
“Respect yourself and others will respect you.” — Confucius