Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Angelou, Maya

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Waitley, Denis

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.

Vaughan, Bill

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, James

12.

Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories.

Wilmot, John

13.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

14.

D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

It takes three to make a child.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

16.

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

Buck, Pearl S.

17.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Friedan, Betty

18.

Rich, Adrienne

19.

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

Plomp, John

20.

Youth isn't always all it's touted to be.

Lawana Blackwell

21.

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

Jameson, Anna

22.

The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.

King Edward VIII

23.

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

Abbott, Lyman

24.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

25.

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

Dogen

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Baldwin, James

29.

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

30.

There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.

Chase, Alexander

31.

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

Moses, Robert

32.

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

33.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

34.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

38.

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

Dick Cavett

39.

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Proverb

41.

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

Fran Lebowitz

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

Little girl's definition of conscience: Something that makes you tell your mother before your brother or sister does.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Proverb, English

50.

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