Motivational Quotes

Children

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Children

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.

Polanski, Roman

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

Johnson, Lady Bird

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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

Wen I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away my childish things. [I Corinthians]

Bible

12.

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

Lois McMaster Bujold

13.

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

14.

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Long, Lazarus

15.

It takes three to make a child.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

16.

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

17.

We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.

Lair, Dr. Jess

18.

Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.

Moustakas, Clark

19.

A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.

Vaughan, Bill

20.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.

Proverb, English

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb, English

27.

Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.

Capp, Al

28.

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

Ruskin, John

29.

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

Pope, Alexander

30.

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

Proverb

31.

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.

Wilder, Thornton

32.

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

Robert Byrne

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

Edwards, Harry

37.

People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

Bill Watterson

38.

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

John J. Plomp

39.

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

40.

Children and drunks always speak the truth.

Proverb

41.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Novalis

42.

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

Watts, Isaac

43.

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