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

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

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

Rutherford, Samuel

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

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

A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.

Proverb

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

Children are the keys of paradise.

Stoddard, Richard Henry

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.

10.

Children are poor men's riches.

Ray, John

11.

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

Wilmot, John

12.

Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Rich, Adrienne

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Montessori, Maria

19.

The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

Wilder, Thornton

20.

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

Hulbert, Harold

21.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

22.

Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations.

Dobson, Dr. James C.

23.

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

Angelou, Maya

24.

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

25.

Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.

Capp, Al

26.

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

27.

Anyone who uses the phrase'easy as taking candy from a baby'has never tried taking candy from a baby.

28.

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

Freud, Sigmund

29.

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

30.

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

Ruskin, John

31.

There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities.

Spolin, Viola

32.

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

Larkin, Philip

33.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

34.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

35.

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

Rabbinical Saying

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

39.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

40.

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

41.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

42.

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.

43.

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

Robert Byrne

44.

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

Morley, Christopher

45.

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

Peter Ustinov

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

49.

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

50.

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

Mary MacCracken