Children - Quotes

A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn’t act that way very often. - Unknown

A child building a sandcastle is not "working hard". It doesn’t seem to him to be a task. It simply fills his imagination at the time it’s going on, and anything else is an irritant. - Jonathan Miller

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

A child is an uncut diamond. - Austin O’Malley

A child is going to remember who was there, not what you spent on them. Kids outgrow toys and outfits, but they never outgrow time and love. - Unknown

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit. - Francois Rabelais

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes –  and it will come – may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system. - Jane Smiley

A child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every passer-by leaves a mark. - Chinese Saying

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. - Unknown

Before children can learn how to resolve conflict, they must empty their cup with respect to believing that aggression should always be met with aggression. - Terrence Webster-Doyle

By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments. - Eileen Kennedy-Moore

Children are a comfort to men because the youngsters cannot contradict them. - Abraham Miller

Children are natural mimics. They act like their parents in spite of every attempt to teach them good manners. - Grenville Kleiser

Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible. - R. D. Laing

Children are poor men’s riches. - English Proverb

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. - Aldous Huxley

Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex. - Yevgeny Zamyatin

Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys. - Charles de Lint

Children are the great gamble. From the moment they are born, our helplessness increases. Instead of being ours to mould and shape after our best knowledge and endeavour, they are themselves. - Josephine Hart

Children aren’t colouring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favourite colours. - Khaled Hosseini

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

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present, which seldom happens to us. - Unknown

Children have never been any good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. - James Baldwin 

Children learn more from what you are than what you teach. - W. E. B DuBois

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. - Margaret Mead

Children naturally live in the moment and they allow that moment to be what it is; magical and beautiful in every way. - Unknown

Children need models more than they need critics. - Joseph Joubert

Children reinvent your world for you. - Susan Sarandon

Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. - Eudora Welty

Children, no matter how gifted, can't see far into the future, you know. To them, a year is almost a lifetime, and telling them that things will be fine when they grow up does no good at all. - John Saul

Children's games are hardly games. Children are never more serious than when they play. - Montaigne

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. - Maya Angelou

Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. - Plato

Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy. - Robert Heinlein

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time. - Rabbinical Saying

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. - Charles R. Swindoll

Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once he grows up. - Pablo Picasso

Every child lives up to the expectation you have for him. - Kevin Leman

Every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends toward the formation of character. - Hosea Ballou

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist. - Michael Levinve

How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man. - Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson 

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. - Walt Disney

I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will. - Walt Disney

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. - Rachael Carson

If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. - P. D. James

If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. - Carl Gustav Jung

If we would amend the world, we should mend ourselves; and teach our children to be, not what we are, but what they should be. - William Penn

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. - Friedrich Nietzsche

It is a wise father that knows his own child. - William Shakespeare

It’s not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It’s our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless. - L. R. Knost

It is important to communicate to children about what we are going through. We often speak in half truths. We don't frame the truth or explain our experience in terms they can understand. We need to take time to do this. What has to happen is that more people have to get involved with more children. Focus energy on the child. Children are raising themselves these days in all sorts of strange ways. - James Redfield

It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings. - Ann Landers

It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts. - Louisa May Alcott

Kids ... can get to the point where they feel peer pressure that isn't even there simply because of how they see themselves. - Walt Mueller

Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are. - Jim Henson

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear. - Judy Blume

Look at the world through a child’s eyes and see if that would not bring a little zest for living back into your life. - Unknown

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember. - Margaret Drabble

Love not your children unequally; or if you do, show it not, lest you make the one proud, and the other envious, and both fools. - Wellins Calcott

Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity. - Christian Nestell Bovee

Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children. - William Penn

Most children feel immortal – they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible. - John Saul 

No child is born a criminal: no child is born an angel: he’s just born. - Sir Sydney Smith

No kid is unsmart. Every kid’s a genius at something. Our job is to find it. And then encourage it. - Robin Sharma

Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. - Douglas Adams

Only where children gather is there any real chance of fun. - Mignon McLaughlin

Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children. - Walt Disney

Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do. - Barbara Walters

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Screaming at children over their grades, especially to the point of the child’s tears, is child abuse, pure and simple. It’s not funny and it’s not good parenting. It is a crushing, scarring, disastrous experience for the child. It isn’t the least bit funny. - Ben Stein

Small children give you a headache, big children a heartache. - Russian Proverb

Some people never learn how to talk to kids. They turn up the volume and enunciate with extra care, as if talking to a partially deaf immigrant. They sound as if they're reading lines somebody else wrote for them, or as if what they're saying is really for the benefit of other adults listening and not just for the child. Kids sense that and turn off. - F. Paul Wilson

Spend time with children. Learn more about laughter, spontaneity, curiosity, acceptance, resilience, trust, determination, and your imagination. They are here to teach us. - Unknown

That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterwards makes him a manager of life. - Henry Ward Beecher

The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of their time each day. - M. Grundler

The children despise their parents until the age of when they suddenly become just like them – thus preserving the system. - Quentin

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. - Socrates

The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe. - Jean Paul Richter

The deeds of the children are a testament to the upbringing they received from their parents. - Christopher Paolini

The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refuelling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be. - Marianne E. Neifert

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet. - Isadora Duncan 

The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft. - Philip Wylie

The greatest gifts you can give your children are … the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. - Denis Waitley

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith. - Billy Graham

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. - John Lubbock

The more we shelter children from every disappointment, the more devastating future disappointments will be. - Fred G. Gosman

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. - Stephen Nachmanovitch

The native and untaught suggestions of inquisitive children do often offer things, that may set a considering man's thoughts on work. And I think there is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed, and the prejudices of their education. - John Locke

The older I get, the more I marvel at the wisdom of children. - David Morgan

The soul is healed by being with children. - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice. - Peggy O'Mara

This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period. - Anne Lamott

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own. - Aristotle

Those who educate children well are more to be honoured than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well. - Aristotle

Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain. - John Locke

To lose a child ... was something that could end one's world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent. - Alexader McCall Smith

Toddlers who don’t learn gradually about disappointment lose their resilience through lack of practice in give-and-take with other people’s needs. They can become self-centred, demanding, and difficult to like or to be with. - Alicia F. Lieberman

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. - Roger Lewin

Train your child as if you were preparing a prince for his future reign, for he will grow up to be one of the forces that shapes the future of mankind. - Unknown

We know that the outcasts and misfits are the children most likely to become violent, so it only follows that we must pull them into the arms of love and/or acceptance, and find a place where they fit. If our system doesn't have a place where a child fits, there's something wrong with the system, not the child. - William G. Defoore

We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do. - Brigham Young

We teach children to save their money. As an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has value. But it is not positive; it does not lead the child into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save. - Henry Ford

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that the is someone today. - Stacia Tauscher

What children say, they have heard at home. - West African Proverb

What we instil in our children will be the foundation upon which they build their future. - Steve Maraboli

Whatever you teach a child, whether it is through your words or through your actions, lives on forever in his or her heart. - Unknown

When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart. - Horace Mann

When people talk about wanting to "have children someday," what they really mean is that they want babies. Nobody wants an angry adolescent. Nobody wants an obnoxious seven-year-old trying to wear out dirty words they just learned in school that day. What they really want is cute, adorable babies who love you and need you. The bad stuff is just the price you agree to pay for having the good stuff. - Paul Reiser

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about. - Angela Schwindt

You can do anything with children if only you play with them. - German Proverb

You cannot fail to parent your children at home, then expect teachers to work miracles with them in the classroom. - Unknown

Your children need your presence more than your presents. - Jesse Jackson