Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

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

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.

Abbott, Lyman

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

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

Jameson, Anna

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Daniel Raeburn

14.

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

Groucho Marx

15.

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

Groucho Marx

16.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

What you don't know takes a lot of explaining to the children.

18.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

19.

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

20.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

21.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

22.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

Hazzard, Shirley

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

Keillor, Garrison

26.

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.

Bruce Barton

27.

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

28.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

29.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Robert Orben

33.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

34.

Anyone who uses the phrase'easy as taking candy from a baby'has never tried taking candy from a baby.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Watts, Isaac

38.

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

Freud, Sigmund

39.

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

Rutherford, Samuel

40.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

41.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

42.

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.

43.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

44.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

45.

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

Shakespeare, William

46.

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

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

49.

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

Norman Douglas

50.

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

Chase, Alexander