Children quotes
25.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside children — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I'm in good company there."
"I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul."
"By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit."
"The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader follows the will of the people. All of the embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don't love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play. In this they are like children and in harmony with the Tao."
"Who knows when the end is reached? Death may be the beginning of life. How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know that he who dreads to die is as a child who has lost the way and cannot find his way home? How do I know that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?"
"I was like a total cliched '80s child. I had Barbies, obviously, as well as My Little Ponies and Cabbage Patch Kids, but I used to destroy them. I used to draw all over their faces and cut off their hair."
"Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children."
"I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every girl, every child, to be educated."
"We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts."
"My hopes are that I can give my children security, health, and the confidence to create the life they want and serve others."
"Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world."
"I'm a child of the Women's Movement. I always believed that I could do anything. That women didn't have to be limited in any way."
"One of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants."
"How do you know if your child is a writer? Your obstetrician holds his stethoscope to your abdomen and only hears excuses."
"Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching."
"I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done; swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he wound up with."
"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."
"It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it."
"When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em."
"He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune."
