Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Children

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

Buck, Pearl S.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

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

Peter Ustinov

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

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

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

Dogen

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

10.

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Jordan, June

11.

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

Robert Orben

12.

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

William Shakespeare

13.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

Whitehorn, Katharine

14.

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

Morley, Christopher

15.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

16.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

17.

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

18.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

19.

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

Eliot, George

20.

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

Campbell, Beatrix

21.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

Ball, Lucille

31.

Too often when give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

Lewin, Roger

32.

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.

33.

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

Dyer, Wayne

34.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

35.

Children need love, especially when they don't deserve it.

Hulbert, Harold

36.

Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.

Capp, Al

37.

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

38.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

39.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

40.

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

41.

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

Ovid

42.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Bachelard, Gaston

43.

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

Picasso, Pablo

44.

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

Jameson, Anna

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

Hazzard, Shirley

49.

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

Freud, Sigmund

50.

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

Watts, Isaac