Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Mead, Margaret

Best Quotes about Children

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

Ruskin, John

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

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

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

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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

Waitley, Denis

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

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

Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are old.

Proverb, English

10.

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

11.

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

Daniel Raeburn

12.

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.

13.

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

Ball, Lucille

14.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

15.

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

Dorothy Parker

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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 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

21.

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

Parker, Dorothy

22.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

23.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

Hunt, Leigh

24.

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

Baldwin, James

25.

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

26.

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

27.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

29.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

30.

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

Fyfe, David

31.

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.

32.

For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.

Cottle, Thomas J.

33.

Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.

34.

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.

Jones, Franklin P.

35.

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

Bombeck, Erma

36.

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

37.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

38.

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

Ruskin, John

39.

But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Baldwin, James

44.

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

45.

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

Dyer, Wayne

46.

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

47.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

48.

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

49.

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

Robert Byrne

50.

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.