Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

Roosevelt, Theodore

Level with your child by being honest. Nobody spots a phony quicker than a child.

Mary MacCracken

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

Rich, Adrienne

Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.

Klee, Paul

Too often when give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

Lewin, Roger

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

William Shakespeare

10.

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

11.

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

Shakespeare, William

12.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Edwards, Harry

16.

That's the funny thing about havin'a kid. They come with their own set of problems; make everything else you were worried about seem kinda silly.

Greg Garcia

17.

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

18.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

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

Dick Cavett

21.

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

Churchill, Winston

22.

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

Sam Levenson

23.

Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.

Howe, Edgar Watson

24.

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

Norman Douglas

25.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

26.

Children are all foreigners.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

Jameson, Anna

29.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

30.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

31.

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

32.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

33.

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

Dorothy Parker

34.

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

Wilbur, Ray L.

35.

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

Proverb

36.

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

Wiesel, Elie

37.

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

38.

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

39.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

40.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

41.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

45.

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

Lair, Dr. Jess

46.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

It takes three to make a child.

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

48.

But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

49.

Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

50.

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