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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"A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention."
"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."
"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult."
"I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts - spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back - length of life."
"How can we expect our children to know and experience the joy of giving unless we teach them that the greater pleasure in life lies in the art of giving rather than receiving."
"I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy."
"Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
"We need to think of the future and the planet we are going to leave to our children and their children."
"Hugs can do great amounts of good - especially for children."
"Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them: I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom and what time you would get home. ... I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your friend was a creep. I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess, 'I stole this.' ... But most of all I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it. That was the hardest part of all."
"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
"It takes a strong man to accept somebody else's children and step up to the plate another man left on the table."
"If you deny yourself access to the child within because you're too serious, you also block your connection to the divine Light and your feminine self. Every creator who's any good uses their feminine side to create with.. Whether a scientist working on a hunch, a painter working on the interplay of colors, or a musician dealing with the juxtaposition of notes and chords."
"Bear in mind, my children, that only cowards and those who are weak commit sin and tell lies. The brave are always moral. Try to be moral, try to be brave, try to be sympathising."
"Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens."
"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction."
"You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children."
"I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child."
"I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'"
"Children are smarter than any of us. Know how I know that? I don't know one child with a full time job and children."
