Motivational Quotes

Children

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

Best Quotes about Children

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Behn, Aphra

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

Dick Cavett

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

Who, Dr.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Children need models rather than critics.

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

Dogen

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Bombeck, Erma

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Jordan, June

10.

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

Groucho Marx

11.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

12.

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

John J. Plomp

13.

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

14.

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

15.

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

John Gray

16.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

17.

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

18.

Facing a mirror you see merely your own countenance; facing your child you finally understand how everyone else has seen you.

Daniel Raeburn

19.

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

Jameson, Anna

20.

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

Rabbinical Saying

21.

Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.

Saki

22.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

23.

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

Proverb

24.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

25.

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

26.

Birds in their little nest agree; and 'Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.

Watts, Isaac

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

Ball, Lucille

29.

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

Abbott, Lyman

30.

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

Hulbert, Harold

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

35.

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

36.

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

William Shakespeare

37.

There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.

Baldwin, James

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Angelou, Maya

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

44.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Tracy, Brian

45.

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.

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.