Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Children

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

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

Rutherford, Samuel

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.

Moustakas, Clark

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

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

Moses, Robert

10.

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

11.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

12.

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

Freud, Sigmund

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Picasso, Pablo

16.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

17.

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

Nash, Ogden

18.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

Fran Lebowitz

19.

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

Edwards, Harry

20.

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.

21.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

22.

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.

Groucho Marx

23.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

24.

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

25.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

26.

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone, or forbid your children to do it.

Crane, Monta

27.

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

28.

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

Robert Orben

29.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

30.

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

31.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

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

33.

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

34.

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

35.

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

Ball, Lucille

36.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

37.

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

38.

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

Sam Levenson

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

42.

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

43.

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

Kraus, Karl

44.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

45.

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

46.

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

Ovid

47.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

48.

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

49.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

50.

It needs courage to let our children go, but we are trustees and stewards and have to hand them back to life--to God. As the old saying puts it: What I gave I have. We have to love them and lose them.

Torrie, Alfred