Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

Baldwin, James

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

There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities.

Spolin, Viola

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

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.

Howe, Edgar Watson

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

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

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.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Capp, Al

12.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

13.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

14.

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

15.

Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

17.

There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.

Chase, Alexander

18.

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

Groucho Marx

19.

If you can give your son or daughter only one gift, let it be enthusiasm.

Bruce Barton

20.

A little less worry over the child and a bit more concern about the world we make for the child to live in.

Meyer, Adolph

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

24.

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

Plomp, John

25.

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

Ovid

26.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Shakespeare, William

30.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

31.

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

Robert Orben

32.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

33.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

34.

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.

35.

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

Angelou, Maya

36.

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

37.

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

38.

It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.

Fyfe, David

39.

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

Baldwin, James

40.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

41.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

42.

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

Campbell, Beatrix

43.

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

44.

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

45.

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

Buck, Pearl S.

46.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

47.

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

Mary MacCracken

48.

Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.

Dobson, Dr. James C.

49.

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

William Shakespeare

50.

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