Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

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

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

Ovid

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

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Bombeck, Erma

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

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

Ball, Lucille

Wen I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away my childish things. [I Corinthians]

Bible

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

Cox, Marcelene

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, James

12.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

13.

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children

Adams, John

14.

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

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

17.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. [Luke 17:2]

Bible

18.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

Wilder, Thornton

19.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

25.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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

John Gray

28.

Anyone who uses the phrase'easy as taking candy from a baby'has never tried taking candy from a baby.

29.

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

Capp, Al

30.

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

31.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

32.

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

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.

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

Proverb, English

35.

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.

Robert Orben

36.

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

Robert Orben

37.

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

Peter Ustinov

38.

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

John J. Plomp

39.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

40.

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

Plomp, John

41.

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

42.

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

Baldwin, James

43.

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

Watts, Isaac

44.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

45.

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

Fran Lebowitz

46.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

47.

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Lair, Dr. Jess

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Lawana Blackwell