quotations about children
If we would amend the world, we should mend our selves; and teach our children to be, not what we are, but what they should be.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Children are natural mimics. They act like their parents in spite of every attempt to teach them good manners.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Love of children is the homage of the heart to unsullied purity. Indeed, children are the bright side of life. From our sins and sorrows, how refreshing is it to turn to their artless ways and purer joys! Would that they could all be so educated, as not, in their after-years, to darken life by their offenses!
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Oh, kids are great! You can teach them to hate what you hate!
HOMER SIMPSON
The Simpsons
The kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving ways.
RUSSELL A. BARKLEY
attributed, Dad's Wit and Wisdom: Quips and Quotes for Fantastic Fathers
I have long felt that the way to keep children out of trouble is to keep them interested in things. Lecturing to children is no answer to delinquency. Preaching won't keep youngsters out of trouble, but keeping their minds occupied will.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
How parents interact with each child as he or she enters the family circle determines in great part that child's final destiny.
KEVIN LEMAN
The Birth Order Book
Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
PHYLLIS DILLER
Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse
Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, May 17, 2014
Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A child is a priest of the ordinary, fulfilling a sacred office that absolutely no one else can fill. The simplest gesture, the ephemeral movement, the commonest object all become precious beyond words when touched, noticed, lived by one's own dear child.
MIKE MASON
The Mystery of Children
Every child lives up to the expectation you have for him.
KEVIN LEMAN
Have a New Kid by Friday
Children ... are unripe and imperfect; their virtues, therefore, are to be considered not merely as relative to their actual state, but principally in reference to that maturity and perfection to which nature has destined them.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
CHARLES DICKENS
Master Humphrey's Clock
Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That’s not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 2008
The family is both the fundamental unit of society as well as the root of culture. It ... is a perpetual source of encouragement, advocacy, assurance, and emotional refueling that empowers a child to venture with confidence into the greater world and to become all that he can be.
MARIANNE E. NEIFERT
Dr. Mom's Parenting Guide
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.
PAUL REISER
Good Housekeeping, 1997