Motivational Quotes

Children

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

- Wilbur, Ray L.

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

Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?

Epictetus

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

Hunt, Leigh

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

Angelou, Maya

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

Edwards, Harry

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Tracy, Brian

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

Watts, Isaac

10.

My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.

Groucho Marx

11.

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

Proverb, English

12.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

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

Baldwin, James

15.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

16.

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

Pope, Alexander

17.

Facing a mirror you see merely your own countenance; facing your child you finally understand how everyone else has seen you.

Daniel Raeburn

18.

Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.

Gray, Thomas

19.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.

Nash, Ogden

20.

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

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Jameson, Anna

25.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

26.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

27.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

28.

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

Hulbert, Harold

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

32.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

33.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

34.

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

35.

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

Wilmot, John

36.

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

Waitley, Denis

37.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Bachelard, Gaston

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Peter Ustinov

42.

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

43.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

44.

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Phyllis Diller

45.

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

John J. Plomp

46.

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

47.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

48.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

49.

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

Fyfe, David

50.

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