Motivational Quotes

Children

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

- Buck, Pearl S.

Best Quotes about Children

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

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

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

Baldwin, James

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

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

Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

Wilder, Thornton

Facing a mirror you see merely your own countenance; facing your child you finally understand how everyone else has seen you.

Daniel Raeburn

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

Davis, Bette

10.

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

11.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

Swift, Jonathan

13.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Wiesel, Elie

14.

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.

Canetti, Elias

15.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

17.

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.

Decter, Midge

18.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

19.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Freud, Sigmund

20.

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant--and let the air out of the tires.

Dorothy Parker

21.

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.

Howe, Edgar Watson

22.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

Jones, Franklin P.

23.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Dogen

24.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

25.

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

26.

No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.

Taylor, Jeremy

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

30.

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.

Jones, Franklin P.

31.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.

Shakespeare, William

32.

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

Lamb, Charles

33.

D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.

Dobson, Dr. James C.

35.

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Dyer, Wayne

36.

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

37.

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.

Vaughan, Bill

38.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

39.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

40.

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. [Proverbs 22:15]

Bible

41.

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone, or forbid your children to do it.

Crane, Monta

42.

Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.

Picasso, Pablo

43.

Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.

Moustakas, Clark

44.

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

Dick Cavett

45.

How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

Ovid

46.

Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.

Johnson, Lady Bird

47.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

Fran Lebowitz

48.

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

49.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Gibran, Kahlil

50.

The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Wilder, Thornton