Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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

Capp, Al

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

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

Wilmot, John

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

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

Dick Cavett

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

Ruskin, John

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

13.

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

14.

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

15.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.

Lois McMaster Bujold

16.

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Greer, Germaine

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Pope, Alexander

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

23.

Children and drunks always speak the truth.

Proverb

24.

What is done to children, they will do to society.

Menninger, Karl A.

25.

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

26.

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

Ball, Lucille

27.

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

John J. Plomp

28.

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

Shakespeare, William

29.

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

30.

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

Crane, Monta

31.

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

John Gray

32.

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Jordan, June

33.

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

34.

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

Smith, Logan Pearsall

35.

Outings are so much more fun when we can savor them through the children's eyes.

Lawana Blackwell

36.

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

37.

Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.

Ruskin, John

38.

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Groucho Marx

39.

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

Angelou, Maya

40.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

41.

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

42.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Lois McMaster Bujold

43.

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

Klee, Paul

44.

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

Jameson, Anna

45.

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

Freud, Sigmund

46.

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

Moustakas, Clark

47.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

Davis, Bette

48.

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

Hulbert, Harold

49.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Curie, Madame Marie

50.

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