Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- William Shakespeare

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

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

Proverb, English

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

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

Dogen

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children.

King Edward VIII

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

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

Angelou, Maya

10.

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

11.

Our children change us... whether they live or not.

Lois McMaster Bujold

12.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

16.

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

Wilmot, John

17.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Kraus, Karl

18.

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

Churchill, Winston

19.

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

Ovid

20.

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

21.

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

Peter Ustinov

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

That's the funny thing about havin'a kid. They come with their own set of problems; make everything else you were worried about seem kinda silly.

Greg Garcia

25.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Auden, W. H.

26.

For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

27.

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

Daniel Raeburn

28.

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

29.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.

36.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

37.

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

38.

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

Crane, Monta

39.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

40.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

41.

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

Lawana Blackwell

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Freud, Sigmund

45.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

46.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

47.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

48.

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

49.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

Montessori, Maria

50.

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