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

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

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

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

Proverb

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

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.

Burbank, Luther

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

Robert Byrne

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

Dogen

12.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

13.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

14.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

15.

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

Pope, Alexander

16.

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

John J. Plomp

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Hulbert, Harold

23.

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

Edwards, Harry

24.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

25.

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

Angelou, Maya

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

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

28.

Children are our most valuable natural resource.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

29.

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

30.

Each child is an adventure into a better life --an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

31.

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

Tauscher, Stacia

32.

A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.

Kraus, Karl

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.

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.

35.

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

Plomp, John

36.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Fielding, Henry

37.

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

Robert Orben

38.

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

Daniel Raeburn

39.

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

40.

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

Norman Douglas

41.

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

Epictetus

42.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.

Angelou, Maya

46.

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. [Luke 17:2]

Bible

47.

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

48.

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

Pogrebin, Letty Cottin

49.

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

Wiesel, Elie

50.

The child is the father of the man.

Wordsworth, William