Motivational Quotes

Children

You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

- Gibran, Kahlil

Best Quotes about Children

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

Gray, Thomas

Our children change us... whether they live or not.

Lois McMaster Bujold

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

Moustakas, Clark

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.

Jones, Franklin P.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.

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

Abbott, Lyman

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. [Proverbs 22:15]

Bible

12.

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

13.

It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.

John Gray

14.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

15.

You see much more of your children once they leave home.

Ball, Lucille

16.

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

Eliot, George

17.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

18.

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

Baldwin, James

19.

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

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

22.

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

Churchill, Winston

23.

It takes three to make a child.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

24.

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

25.

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

Angelou, Maya

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.

Nash, Ogden

30.

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

31.

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

Freud, Sigmund

32.

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

Dick Cavett

33.

We've had bad luck with our kids -- they've all grown up.

Morley, Christopher

34.

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Friedan, Betty

35.

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

Edwards, Harry

36.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

37.

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

38.

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

Who, Dr.

39.

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

40.

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.

Canetti, Elias

41.

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

Mead, Margaret

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Lair, Dr. Jess

44.

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

45.

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

William Shakespeare

46.

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

47.

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

Peter Ustinov

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo