Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Children

Hugs can do great amounts of good -- especially for children.

Diana, Princess of Wales

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

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

Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are old.

Proverb, English

Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?

Epictetus

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

Eliot, George

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

Cox, Marcelene

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

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

Menninger, Karl A.

10.

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Dyer, Wayne

11.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

12.

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Lois McMaster Bujold

13.

When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.

Ziglar, Zig

14.

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.

15.

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

Rabbinical Saying

16.

Adults are obsolete children.

Seuss, Dr.

17.

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

Plomp, John

18.

Never raise your hand to your children; it leaves your midsection unprotected.

Robert Orben

19.

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

20.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde

21.

In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

Ruskin, John

22.

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

John Gray

23.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Curie, Madame Marie

24.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

Plutarch

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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.

27.

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

Pope, Alexander

28.

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

Ball, Lucille

29.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

30.

Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.

Hope, Bob

31.

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

Morley, Christopher

32.

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

33.

Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.

Phyllis Diller

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Children always turn to the light.

Hare, David

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.

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

Jameson, Anna

39.

It's fun being a kid.

Angier, Bradford Arthur

40.

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

41.

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

Norman Douglas

42.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

43.

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

44.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Kennedy, John F.

45.

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

Peter Ustinov

46.

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

Edwards, Harry

47.

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.