Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Children

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

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

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

Jameson, Anna

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

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

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

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

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

Jones, Franklin P.

10.

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.

Meynell, Alice

11.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

12.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

Ziglar, Zig

15.

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Sam Levenson

19.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

Churchill, Winston

20.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

21.

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

22.

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

Ball, Lucille

23.

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

Oscar Wilde

24.

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

John J. Plomp

25.

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

26.

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

Dorothy Parker

27.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Level with your child by being honest. Nobody spots a phony quicker than a child.

Mary MacCracken

31.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

32.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

33.

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

34.

Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.

35.

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

Capp, Al

36.

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

Plomp, John

37.

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

38.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

39.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

40.

For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.

Cottle, Thomas J.

41.

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

Wilmot, John

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Lawana Blackwell

45.

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

Eliot, George

46.

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

47.

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

Proverb, English

48.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

49.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

50.

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