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

Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Moses, Robert

Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Pollok, Robert

Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.

Friedan, Betty

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.

Campbell, Beatrix

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

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

Mead, Margaret

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Chase, Alexander

10.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Jackson, Jesse

11.

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

12.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

13.

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

14.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

16.

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

Menninger, Karl A.

17.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

Fran Lebowitz

18.

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

Wilbur, Ray L.

19.

Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.

Gray, Thomas

20.

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

Jameson, Anna

21.

Never have children, only grandchildren.

Gore Vidal

22.

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

John J. Plomp

23.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home a pleasant atmosphere and let the air out of the tires.

Parker, Dorothy

24.

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. [Proverbs 22:15]

Bible

25.

A child is fed with milk and praise.

Lamb, Mary

26.

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

Wiesel, Elie

27.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

28.

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

Pope, Alexander

29.

Be gentle with the young.

Juvenal

30.

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

31.

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Greer, Germaine

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

34.

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

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

35.

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.

Robert Orben

36.

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

Norman Douglas

37.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

38.

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

39.

Outings are so much more fun when we can savor them through the children's eyes.

Lawana Blackwell

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Freud, Sigmund

47.

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

48.

When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

Lamb, Charles

49.

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

50.

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