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

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

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

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

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

Abbott, Lyman

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

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

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

Peter Ustinov

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

12.

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

Edwards, Harry

13.

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

Fran Lebowitz

14.

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

15.

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

Mead, Margaret

16.

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

Freud, Sigmund

17.

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

18.

Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.

Bradshaw, John

19.

What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

Landers, Ann

20.

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

21.

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

22.

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

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.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

25.

No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.

Taylor, Jeremy

26.

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

27.

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

Bombeck, Erma

28.

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

29.

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Dyer, Wayne

30.

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

Robert Orben

31.

The best way for a man to train up a child in the way he should go is to travel that way himself.

32.

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.

Polanski, Roman

33.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

34.

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

35.

Decter, Midge

36.

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

Eliot, George

37.

The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant--and let the air out of the tires.

Dorothy Parker

38.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

39.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

40.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

41.

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

Hulbert, Harold

42.

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

43.

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Chase, Alexander

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

47.

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

Kraus, Karl

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell