Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.

Moustakas, Clark

Little girl's definition of conscience: Something that makes you tell your mother before your brother or sister does.

What you don't know takes a lot of explaining to the children.

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

Epictetus

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

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

Jones, Franklin P.

10.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Daniel Raeburn

16.

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

Montessori, Maria

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.

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

19.

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

20.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

21.

For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.

Cottle, Thomas J.

22.

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

Freud, Sigmund

23.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

24.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

25.

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

26.

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

Bruce Barton

27.

We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.

Tauscher, Stacia

28.

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children

Adams, John

29.

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

Wilmot, John

30.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

Wiesel, Elie

31.

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

32.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

33.

Birds in their little nest agree; and 'Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.

Watts, Isaac

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Robert Orben

36.

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

Bombeck, Erma

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.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

39.

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

Lawana Blackwell

40.

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

41.

Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.

Robert Byrne

43.

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

Kraus, Karl

44.

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

45.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

46.

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

47.

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.

Robert Orben

48.

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

Baldwin, James

49.

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

50.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Curie, Madame Marie