Motivational Quotes

Children

Children need models rather than critics.

- Joubert, Joseph

Best Quotes about Children

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

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

Ziglar, Zig

In all our efforts to provide advantages we have actually produced the busiest, most competitive, highly pressured, and over-organized generation of youngsters in our history.

Shan, Eda J. Le

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

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

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

10.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

11.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

12.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Friedan, Betty

13.

Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.

Waitley, Denis

14.

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

Groucho Marx

15.

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

Ball, Lucille

16.

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

Chase, Alexander

17.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

18.

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

Abbott, Lyman

19.

The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Wilder, Thornton

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

Mead, Margaret

23.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

24.

Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

25.

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

Sam Levenson

26.

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

Montessori, Maria

27.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.

32.

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

33.

There's no point in being grown up if you cant be childish sometimes.

Who, Dr.

34.

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

Capp, Al

35.

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

Peter Ustinov

36.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Bachelard, Gaston

37.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

Tauscher, Stacia

40.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

Swift, Jonathan

41.

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

42.

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.

Burbank, Luther

43.

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

Angelou, Maya

44.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

45.

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