Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Dick Cavett

Best Quotes about Children

Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.

Ruskin, John

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

John J. Plomp

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Greer, Germaine

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

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

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

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

Nash, Ogden

The best way for a man to train up a child in the way he should go is to travel that way himself.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

10.

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

11.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

12.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

13.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Kraus, Karl

14.

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

Baldwin, James

15.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

17.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Too often when give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

Lewin, Roger

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb, English

21.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

22.

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

Pope, Alexander

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Moustakas, Clark

26.

Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.

Gray, Thomas

27.

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

28.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

Montessori, Maria

29.

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

30.

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

Watts, Isaac

31.

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

Hulbert, Harold

32.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

33.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

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

Wiesel, Elie

35.

A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.

Harrison, Jane

36.

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

Dick Cavett

37.

The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present.

Ruskin, John

38.

But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

39.

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

40.

Each child is an adventure into a better life --an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

41.

We've had bad luck with our kids -- they've all grown up.

Morley, Christopher

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

47.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

48.

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.

Burbank, Luther

49.

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

50.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Friedan, Betty