Motivational Quotes

Children

How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

- Ovid

Best Quotes about Children

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

Cottle, Thomas J.

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

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

Wen I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away my childish things. [I Corinthians]

Bible

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

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

Shakespeare, William

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

Anna Quindlen

10.

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

11.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

12.

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

Wilbur, Ray L.

13.

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

14.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

15.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Pope, Alexander

19.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

20.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

Jones, Franklin P.

21.

What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

Landers, Ann

22.

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

Wiesel, Elie

23.

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

24.

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

Dyer, Wayne

25.

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

26.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

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

Epictetus

28.

Kids use to ask where they came from, now they tell you where to go

29.

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

30.

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.

FeNelon, Francois

31.

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

Who, Dr.

32.

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.

33.

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

Proverb

34.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Dogen

35.

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

36.

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

Watts, Isaac

37.

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

Larkin, Philip

38.

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

Fyfe, David

39.

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

Abbott, Lyman

40.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

42.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

43.

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

44.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

45.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.

Dick Cavett

46.

It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.

John Gray

47.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

49.

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

50.

I must take issue with the term'a mere child,'for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Fran Lebowitz