Motivational Quotes

Children

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

- Saki

Best Quotes about Children

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

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

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.

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

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

Wilmot, John

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

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

10.

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

John Gray

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Dogen

17.

For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.

Key, Ellen

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.

Hunt, Leigh

25.

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

Capp, Al

26.

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

Groucho Marx

27.

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

28.

The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Wilder, Thornton

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

It takes three to make a child.

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

31.

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

John J. Plomp

32.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Sam Levenson

37.

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant--and let the air out of the tires.

Dorothy Parker

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

41.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

42.

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

Lawana Blackwell

43.

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.