Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

Ruskin, John

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.

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.

Sam Levenson

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Bombeck, Erma

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Tauscher, Stacia

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

John J. Plomp

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

10.

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

11.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Crane, Monta

16.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Buck, Pearl S.

18.

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

Dick Cavett

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Jameson, Anna

22.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

23.

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

24.

Outings are so much more fun when we can savor them through the children's eyes.

Lawana Blackwell

25.

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

Ovid

26.

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

Angelou, Maya

27.

It needs courage to let our children go, but we are trustees and stewards and have to hand them back to life--to God. As the old saying puts it: What I gave I have. We have to love them and lose them.

Torrie, Alfred

28.

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

29.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

Roosevelt, Theodore

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Chase, Alexander

33.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

34.

The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.

King Edward VIII

35.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

38.

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

39.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

40.

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

Kraus, Karl

41.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

Hunt, Leigh

42.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

43.

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

44.

What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

Landers, Ann

45.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

Proverb, English

48.

For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.

Key, Ellen

49.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Robert Byrne

50.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold