Motivational Quotes

Children

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

- Hoover, Herbert Clark

Best Quotes about Children

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

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

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. [Proverbs 22:15]

Bible

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

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

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

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Morley, Christopher

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

10.

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

Dyer, Wayne

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Fran Lebowitz

14.

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

15.

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

Daniel Raeburn

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

20.

Children are the only form of immortality that we can be sure of.

Peter Ustinov

21.

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

Groucho Marx

22.

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

Oscar Wilde

23.

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

24.

Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.

Capp, Al

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

28.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

Wilder, Thornton

29.

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

Shakespeare, William

30.

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

Baldwin, James

31.

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

Buck, Pearl S.

32.

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

Epictetus

33.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

34.

You see much more of your children once they leave home.

Ball, Lucille

35.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

36.

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

Lewin, Roger

37.

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

38.

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

Proverb

39.

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.

Meynell, Alice

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Groucho Marx

43.

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

Norman Douglas

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

50.

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

Wilbur, Ray L.