Children quotes

Children

25.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

25.4K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside children — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Children quotes (page 305 of 1272)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite. It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things you forget even to teach that they learn."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again."

Read quote 3 likes
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer, Journalist
Children

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

Read quote 3 likes
Golda Meir Politician
Children

"It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]."

Read quote 3 likes
Gordon Smith Artist
Children

"We have a rare and perhaps small window of opportunity to set partisan differences aside, and attempt to achieve what many in recent years have felt was unreachable - greater retirement security for ourselves and our children."

Read quote 3 likes
Gore Vidal Writer, Essayist, Playwright
Children

"Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge."

Read quote 3 likes
Gore Vidal Writer, Essayist, Playwright
Children

"I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character."

Read quote 3 likes