Motivational Quotes

Children

Our children change us... whether they live or not.

- Lois McMaster Bujold

Best Quotes about Children

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

Morley, Christopher

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

Dorothy Parker

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

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

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

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

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

Franklin, Benjamin

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.

Nash, Ogden

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

10.

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

Robert Byrne

11.

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

12.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Shakespeare, William

15.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

16.

The best way for a man to train up a child in the way he should go is to travel that way himself.

17.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

18.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

19.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

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

22.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

23.

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

24.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

Angelou, Maya

25.

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

Wilbur, Ray L.

26.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

27.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

Keillor, Garrison

28.

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

29.

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

Daniel Raeburn

30.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

31.

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

William Shakespeare

32.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. [Luke 17:2]

Bible

33.

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

Plomp, John

34.

Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Eliot, George

35.

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

Watts, Isaac

36.

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

37.

Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.

Johnson, Lady Bird

38.

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.

Robert Orben

39.

Children and drunks always speak the truth.

Proverb

40.

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

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

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

43.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

44.

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

Cosby, Bill

45.

What you don't know takes a lot of explaining to the children.

46.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

47.

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

48.

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

49.

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children

Adams, John

50.

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

Waitley, Denis