Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

Norman Douglas

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

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

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Greer, Germaine

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Tauscher, Stacia

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

Jameson, Anna

10.

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.

11.

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

Groucho Marx

12.

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

Wiesel, Elie

13.

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

14.

There is not so much comfort in having children as there is sorrow in parting with them.

Proverb

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Robert Byrne

18.

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

Dogen

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Morley, Christopher

22.

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

23.

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

Who, Dr.

24.

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

25.

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

Eliot, George

26.

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

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

30.

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

31.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

32.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

33.

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

Plomp, John

34.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

35.

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

36.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.

Whitehorn, Katharine

38.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William

39.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

40.

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

Dick Cavett

41.

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

42.

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

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

44.

How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.

Ovid

45.

The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.

Sam Levenson

46.

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

47.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.