Quotations and Poems

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

» “As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children”
– John Adams

» “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.”
– Maya Angelou

» “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.”
– Maya Angelou

» “It’s fun being a kid.”
– Bradford Arthur Angier

» “The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”
– W. H. Auden

» “Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.”
– Gaston Bachelard

» “There is a ‘’sanctity” involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.”
– James Baldwin

» “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
– James Baldwin

» “You see much more of your children once they leave home.”
– Lucille Ball

» “There is no sinner like a young saint.”
– Aphra Behn

» “It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawnmower, snow-blower, or vacuum cleaner.”
– Ben Bergor

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

» “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

» “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

» “It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.”
– Erma Bombeck

» “Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.”
– Erma Bombeck

» “Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.”
– Christian Nevell Bovee

» “Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.”
– John Bradshaw

» “The only moral lesson which is suited for a child, the most important lesson for every time of life, is this: ”Never hurt anybody.””
– Denis Breeze

» “But the child’s sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

» “What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.”
– Pearl S. Buck

» “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.”
– Luther Burbank

» “The first duty to children is to make them happy, If you have not made them so, you have wronged them, No other good they may get can make up for that.”
– Charles Buxton

» “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.”
– Beatrix Campbell

» “Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.”
– Elias Canetti

» “Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.”
– Al Capp

» “There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.”
– Alexander Chase

» “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”
– Marcus T. Cicero

» “Children have more need of models than of critics.”
– Carolyn Coats

» “It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.”
– Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

» “Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you’re telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.”
– Bill Cosby

» “For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.”
– Thomas J. Cottle

» “Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.”
– Marcelene Cox

» “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.”
– Marcelene Cox

» “There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone, or forbid your children to do it.”
– Monta Crane

» “It takes three to make a child.”
– E.E. Edward

» “All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.”
– Madame Marie Curie

» “Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.”
– Richard H. Dana

» “When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.”
– Rodney Dangerfield

» “Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.”
– Bette Davis

» “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.”
– Midge Decter

» “Hugs can do great amounts of good — especially for children.”
– Princess of Wales Diana

» “Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.”
– Phyllis Diller

» “Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.”
– Dr. James C. Dobson

» “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.”
– Dr. James C. Dobson

» “You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.”
– Dogen

» “So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.”
– Isadora Duncan

» “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

» “Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.”
– Wayne Dyer

» “Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.”
– Wayne Dyer

» “We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.”
– Harry Edwards

» “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.”
– Barbara Ehrenreich

» “Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.”
– George Eliot

» “Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.”
– Black Elk

» “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.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?”
– Epictetus

» “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.”
РFrancois F̩Nelon

» “When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.”
– Henry Fielding

» “Let the child’s first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.”
– Benjamin Franklin

» “Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.”
– Sigmund Freud

» “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.”
– Betty Friedan

» “It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.”
– David Fyfe

» “You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”
– Kahlil Gibran

» “If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.”
– Thomas Gray

» “Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.”
– Graham Greene

» “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.”
– Germaine Greer

» “I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex.”
– Jack Handey

» “Children always turn to the light.”
– David Hare

» “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.”
– Jane Harrison

» “Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.”
– Shirley Hazzard

» “Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

» “A child’s education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

» “Children are our most valuable natural resource.”
– Herbert Clark Hoover

» “Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.”
– Bob Hope

» “Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.”
– Edgar Watson Howe

» “Children need love, especially when they don’t deserve it.”
– Harold Hulbert

» “Each child is an adventure into a better life –an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.”
– Hubert H. Humphrey

» “Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.”
– Leigh Hunt

» “Your children need your presence more than your presents.”
– Jesse Jackson

» “Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.”
– Anna Jameson

» “One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”
– Randall Jarrell

» “Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.”
– Lady Bird Johnson

» “Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next.”
– Franklin P. Jones

» “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”
– Franklin P. Jones

» “To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”
– June Jordan

» “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.”
– June Jordan

» “Children need models rather than critics.”
– Joseph Joubert

» “Normally, children learn to gauge rather accurately from the tone of their parent’s voice how seriously to take his threats. Of course, they sometimes misjudge and pay the penalty.”
– Louis Kaplan

» “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.”
– Garrison Keillor

» “A child miseducated is a child lost.”
– John F. Kennedy

» “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.”
– Ellen Key

» “Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”
– Rudyard Kipling

» “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.”
– Paul Klee

» “Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.”
– Jean De La Bruyere

» “We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.”
– Dr. Jess Lair

» “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.”
– Charles Lamb

» “A child is fed with milk and praise.”
– Mary Lamb

» “What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis 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

» “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.”
– Philip Larkin

» “The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.”
– Mel Lazarus

» “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

» “Too often when give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.”
– Roger Lewin

» “Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
– Lazarus Long

» “A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “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.”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

» “My mother loved children — she would have given anything if I had been one.”
– Groucho Marx

» “Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.”
– Margaret Mead

» “What is done to children, they will do to society.”
– Karl A. Menninger

» “A little less worry over the child and a bit more concern about the world we make for the child to live in.”
– Adolph Meyer

» “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.”
– Alice Meynell

» “For truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

» “If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.”
– Maria Montessori

» “We’ve had bad luck with our kids — they’ve all grown up.”
– Christopher Morley

» “He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.”
– Robert Moses

» “Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.”
– Clark Moustakas

» “Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, and that’s what parents were created for.”
– Ogden Nash

» “Where children are, there is the golden age.”
– Novalis

» “Before you beat a child, be sure yourself are not the cause of the offense.”
– Austin O’Malley

» “One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.”
– George Orwell

» “How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.”
– Ovid

» “The best way to keep children at home is to make the home a pleasant atmosphere and let the air out of the tires.”
– Dorothy Parker

» “Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.”
– John Plomp

» “The wildest colts make the best horses.”
– Plutarch

» “Children’s liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.”
– Letty Cottin Pogrebin

» “If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.”
– Roman Polanski

» “Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.”
– Robert Pollok

» “Behold the child, by nature’s kindly law, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.”
– Alexander Pope

» “A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.”
– Proverb

» “There is not so much comfort in having children as there is sorrow in parting with them.”
– Proverb

» “Children and drunks always speak the truth.”
– Proverb

» “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
– Chinese Proverb

» “Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are old.”
– English Proverb

» “Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.”
– English Proverb

» “Children are poor men’s riches.”
– John Ray

» “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.”
– Adrienne Rich

» “For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

» “The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it””
– Jean Jacques Rousseau

» “Childhood is the sleep of reason.”
– Jean Jacques Rousseau

» “The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present.”
– John Ruskin

» “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.”
– John Ruskin

» “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.”
– John Ruskin

» “Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.”
– Samuel Rutherford

» “Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.”
– Saki

» “Adults are obsolete children.”
– Dr. Seuss

» “Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.”
– William Shakespeare

» “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”
– William Shakespeare

» “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.””
– Eda J. Le Shan

» “You save an old man and you save a unit; but save a boy, and you save a multiplication table.”
– Gypsy Smith

» “What’s more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?”
– Logan Pearsall Smith

» “The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mother and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.”
– Benjamin Spock

» “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.””
– Viola Spolin

» “Children are the keys of paradise.”
– Richard Henry Stoddard

» “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.”
– Jonathan Swift

» “We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.”
– Stacia Tauscher

» “No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man’s heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.”
– Jeremy Taylor

» “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.”
– Alfred Torrie

» “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.”
– Brian Tracy

» “I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”
– Harry S. Truman

» “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.”
– Source Unknown

» “Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.”
– Source Unknown

» “What you don’t know takes a lot of explaining to the children.”
– Source Unknown

» “Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.”
– Source Unknown

» “The best way for a man to train up a child in the way he should go is to travel that way himself.”
– Source Unknown

» “Little girl’s definition of conscience: ”Something that makes you tell your mother before your brother or sister does. ””
– Source Unknown

» “Kids use to ask where they came from, now they tell you where to go”
– Source Unknown

» “Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.”
– Source Unknown

» “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.”
– John Updike

» “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.”
– Bill Vaughan

» “Never have children, only grand children.”
– Gore Vidal

» “Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.”
– Denis Waitley

» “Birds in their little nest agree; and ‘Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.”
– Isaac Watts

» “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.”
– Katharine Whitehorn

» “Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.”
– Elie Wiesel

» “The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.”
– Ray L. Wilbur

» “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”
– Oscar Wilde

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

» “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “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.”
– Thornton Wilder

» “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.”
– Thornton Wilder

» “We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.”
– George F. Will

» “Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories.”
– John Wilmot

» “The child is the father of the man.”
– William Wordsworth

» “Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.”
– St.Francis Xavier

» “When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.”
– Zig Ziglar