The importance of vision in keeping a home...

"Doing up cut fingers, kissing hurt places, and singing bedtime songs are small things by themselves; but they will inculcate a love for home and family that will last through life and help to keep America a land of homes.

"Putting up the school lunch for the children or cooking a good meal for the family may seem very insignificant tasks as compared with giving a lecture, writing a book, or doing other things that have a larger audience; but I doubt very much if, in the ultimate reckoning, they will count for as much...It belittles us to think of our daily tasks as mall things, and if we continue to do so, it will in time make us small. It will narrow our horizon and make of our work just drudgery.

"There are so many little things that are really great, and when we learn to look beyond the insignificant-appearing acts themselves to their far-reaching consequences, we will, 'despise not the day of small things.' We will feel an added dignity and poise from the fact that our everyday round of duties is as important as any other part of the work of the world.

"And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, is like the garden gleam of sunlight that runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization."

Laura Ingalls Wilder from "Little House in the Ozarks", written in May 1923
As quoted by Kathy Peel in "The Family Manager."