Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Children

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Groucho Marx

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.

The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present.

Ruskin, John

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.

FeNelon, Francois

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

Mary MacCracken

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

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

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

Montessori, Maria

10.

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

11.

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

Epictetus

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Eliot, George

15.

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

Phyllis Diller

16.

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

William Shakespeare

17.

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

Bombeck, Erma

18.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

21.

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

Waitley, Denis

22.

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

Lawana Blackwell

23.

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

24.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.

Dick Cavett

25.

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

26.

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

Robert Orben

27.

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

Hunt, Leigh

28.

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

Fran Lebowitz

29.

Each child is an adventure into a better life --an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

30.

D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

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

Wilmot, John

32.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

33.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

Mead, Margaret

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Baldwin, James

37.

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

38.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

39.

Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.

Davis, Bette

40.

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

41.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

42.

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.

Abbott, Lyman

43.

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

Gray, Thomas

44.

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

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.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

47.

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

48.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

49.

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

Klee, Paul

50.

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

Bruce Barton