Childhood quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside childhood — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"It seems very strange ... that in the course of the world's history so obvious an improvement should never have been adopted. ... The next generation of Britishers would be the better for having had this extra hour of daylight in their childhood."
"The childhood of today is the manhood of tomorrow"
"I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood."
"I had a serious childhood illness - sort of like spinal meningitis - that led to a three-month hospitalization. Afterward, I couldn't be insured because of a pre-existing condition."
"To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one."
"The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."
"The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives."
"My dad is Irish. I spent my childhood going back and forth between Ireland and America."
"I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost."
"Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we restore the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it."
"It may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual."
"Genius is childhood recaptured."
"With words, I could build a world I could live in. I had a very dysfunctional family, and a very hard childhood. So I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation."
"It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself."
"In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees"
"The heavy armor becomes the light dress of childhood; the pain is brief, the joy unending."
"Let your old age be childlike, and your childhood like old age; that is, so that neither may your wisdom be with pride, nor your humility without wisdom."
"Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart."
"The gender stereotypes introduced in childhood are reinforced throughout our lives and become self-fulfilling prophesies. Most leadership positions are held by men, so women don't expect to achieve them, and that becomes one of the reasons they don't."
"A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets."
