Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Eliot, George

Best Quotes about Children

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

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

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

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

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Orwell, George

There's no point in being grown up if you cant be childish sometimes.

Who, Dr.

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Edwards, Harry

12.

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

King Edward VIII

13.

Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

15.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Lawana Blackwell

19.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

20.

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

Jameson, Anna

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.

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

23.

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

24.

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

Hunt, Leigh

25.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

26.

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

27.

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

Plomp, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Wilmot, John

32.

Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.

Cosby, Bill

33.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

34.

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

35.

There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

37.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

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

Groucho Marx

39.

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

Peter Ustinov

40.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

41.

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

Eliot, George

42.

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

43.

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

44.

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

Ruskin, John

45.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

Keillor, Garrison

46.

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

Dogen

47.

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

Rich, Adrienne

48.

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

Hulbert, Harold

49.

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

Daniel Raeburn

50.

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