Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.

Johnson, Lady Bird

Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

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

Wilbur, Ray L.

Kids use to ask where they came from, now they tell you where to go

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

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

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

Ruskin, John

10.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

11.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

12.

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

John Gray

13.

He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.

Moses, Robert

14.

There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.

Chase, Alexander

15.

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

Nash, Ogden

16.

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

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Tauscher, Stacia

23.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

24.

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

25.

There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone, or forbid your children to do it.

Crane, Monta

26.

Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Pope, Alexander

28.

What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.

Buck, Pearl S.

29.

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

Ball, Lucille

30.

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

31.

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

Sam Levenson

32.

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.

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

35.

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

Dogen

36.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

40.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

41.

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

42.

In all our efforts to provide advantages we have actually produced the busiest, most competitive, highly pressured, and over-organized generation of youngsters in our history.

Shan, Eda J. Le

43.

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

44.

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

45.

A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.

Harrison, Jane

46.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

47.

Never have children, only grand children.

Vidal, Gore

48.

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

49.

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

Peter Ustinov

50.

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