Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Best Quotes about Children

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children

Adams, John

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

Lawana Blackwell

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

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

Crane, Monta

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

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

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

Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.

Jameson, Anna

Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?

Epictetus

10.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

11.

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

Freud, Sigmund

12.

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

Daniel Raeburn

13.

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

Baldwin, James

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Robert Orben

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

19.

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

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

There is not so much comfort in having children as there is sorrow in parting with them.

Proverb

22.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

23.

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.

24.

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

Chase, Alexander

25.

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

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

Level with your child by being honest. Nobody spots a phony quicker than a child.

Mary MacCracken

28.

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

29.

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

John J. Plomp

30.

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

31.

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

Gray, Thomas

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Norman Douglas

35.

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.

36.

Wen I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away my childish things. [I Corinthians]

Bible

37.

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

Proverb, English

38.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Angelou, Maya

39.

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

Watts, Isaac

40.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

41.

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

42.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

43.

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

44.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

45.

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

Tauscher, Stacia

46.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Curie, Madame Marie

47.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

Lois McMaster Bujold

48.

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

49.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

50.

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

Montessori, Maria