Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

We do our children no favour by keeping them near, coddling them, or showing them off to adult visitors. Not that a nursemaid does not sometimes spoil them. But the greatest favour we can do our children is to give visible example of love and esteem to our spouse. As they grow up, they may then look forward to maturity so they too can find such love.

Eucharista Ward

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.

Dobson, Dr. James C.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

Whitehorn, Katharine

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

Larkin, Philip

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

Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are old.

Proverb, English

10.

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

11.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.

12.

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Pope, Alexander

13.

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

Dogen

14.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. [Luke 17:2]

Bible

15.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

16.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

17.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

18.

Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.

19.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

20.

He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.

Moses, Robert

21.

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.

Polanski, Roman

22.

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

23.

There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.

Chase, Alexander

24.

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Phyllis Diller

25.

Children need love, especially when they don't deserve it.

Hulbert, Harold

26.

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

Dorothy Parker

27.

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

Dick Cavett

28.

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

Ruskin, John

29.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

30.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

31.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.

Robert Orben

33.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

Churchill, Winston

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A little less worry over the child and a bit more concern about the world we make for the child to live in.

Meyer, Adolph

37.

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

38.

Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Eliot, George

39.

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

40.

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

41.

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

Norman Douglas

42.

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

Oscar Wilde

43.

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Lair, Dr. Jess

44.

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

45.

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

Wiesel, Elie

46.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

47.

Birds in their little nest agree; and 'Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.

Watts, Isaac

48.

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?