Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

It takes three to make a child.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

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

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

Angelou, Maya

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

Oscar Wilde

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

Norman Douglas

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

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

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

Jameson, Anna

10.

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

Baldwin, James

11.

I must take issue with the term'a mere child,'for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Fran Lebowitz

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.

15.

It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.

John Gray

16.

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

Watts, Isaac

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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Mary MacCracken

25.

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

Daniel Raeburn

26.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

27.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

28.

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Dyer, Wayne

29.

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

Edwards, Harry

30.

Harrison, Jane

31.

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

32.

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

Sam Levenson

33.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

34.

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

Freud, Sigmund

35.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Tracy, Brian

36.

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

37.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

38.

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

Moustakas, Clark

39.

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.

Howe, Edgar Watson

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.

Robert Orben

43.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

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

Plomp, John

46.

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

John J. Plomp

47.

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

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

49.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

50.

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

Robert Byrne