Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Lair, Dr. Jess

Best Quotes about Children

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

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

Jameson, Anna

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

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

Kraus, Karl

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

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

Smith, Logan Pearsall

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

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

Fyfe, David

10.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

11.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

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

13.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Wiesel, Elie

14.

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

Picasso, Pablo

15.

It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawnmower, snow-blower, or vacuum cleaner.

Bergor, Ben

16.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

17.

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

Bombeck, Erma

18.

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

Dorothy Parker

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Wilbur, Ray L.

22.

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

Ball, Lucille

23.

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

Peter Ustinov

24.

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

25.

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

Sam Levenson

26.

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

Chase, Alexander

27.

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

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.

Moses, Robert

30.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

31.

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

Proverb

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

35.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

36.

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

37.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

38.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

39.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

40.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

41.

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

Watts, Isaac

42.

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

Montessori, Maria

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

46.

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

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

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

49.

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

50.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis