Motivational Quotes

Children

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Best Quotes about Children

Hugs can do great amounts of good -- especially for children.

Diana, Princess of Wales

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Updike, John

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

Youth isn't always all it's touted to be.

Lawana Blackwell

That's the funny thing about havin'a kid. They come with their own set of problems; make everything else you were worried about seem kinda silly.

Greg Garcia

I must take issue with the term'a mere child,'for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Fran Lebowitz

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!

William Shakespeare

What is done to children, they will do to society.

Menninger, Karl A.

It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawnmower, snow-blower, or vacuum cleaner.

Bergor, Ben

10.

Children and drunks always speak the truth.

Proverb

11.

I am amused when goody-goodies proclaim, from the safety of their armchairs, that children are naturally prejudice-free, that they only learn to "hate" from listening to bigoted adults. Nonsense. Tolerance is a learned trait, like riding a bike or playing the piano. Those of us who actually live among children, who see them in their natural environment, know the truth: Left to their own devices, children will gang up on and abuse anyone who is even slightly different from the norm.

Josh Lieb

12.

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

Cox, Marcelene

13.

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

Campbell, Beatrix

14.

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.

FeNelon, Francois

15.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.

Dick Cavett

16.

We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.

Tauscher, Stacia

17.

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

Rich, Adrienne

18.

You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

John J. Plomp

19.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

20.

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

Ziglar, Zig

21.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Orwell, George

22.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

23.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Robert Byrne

24.

There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities.

Spolin, Viola

25.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

26.

Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.

Franklin, Benjamin

27.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Jordan, June

28.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

29.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

30.

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.

Groucho Marx

31.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Lois McMaster Bujold

32.

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

Klee, Paul

33.

You see much more of your children once they leave home.

Ball, Lucille

34.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

35.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.

Robert Orben

37.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Jordan, June

38.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.

Nash, Ogden

39.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Auden, W. H.

40.

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

Cosby, Bill

41.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

Roosevelt, Theodore

42.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

43.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

With children... it is a fact that most parents criticize children more than they laud or congratulate them. We tend to be quick to criticize, slow to praise. We should be careful to keep the praise and the expectations far ahead of the criticism.

45.

It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.

John Gray

46.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.

Bradshaw, John

48.

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

Baldwin, James

49.

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

Anatole Broyard

50.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Groucho Marx