Quotations about Your Child

"Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children."
-- Richard H. Dana

"The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children."
-- Clarence Darrow

"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
-- Antoine de Saint Exupery

"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."
-- Charles Dickens

"I think we're seeing in working mothers a change from “Thank God it's Friday” to “Thank God it's Monday.” If any working mother has not experienced that feeling, her children are not adolescent."
-- Ann Diehl

"We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up."
-- Phyllis Diller

"Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home."
-- Phyllis Diller

"Don't throw away your friendship with your teenager over behavior that has no great moral significance. There will be plenty of real issues that require you to stand like a rock. Save your big guns for those crucial confrontations."
-- Dr. James C. Dobson

"You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child."
-- Dogen

"Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study. Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life."
--Henry Doherty

"The trouble with children is that they are not returnable."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevski

"If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things."
-- Norman Douglas

"So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world."
-- Isadora Duncan

"Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say."
-- Wayne Dyer

"The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children."
-- King Edward VIII

"There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to be a father to them. "
--Anthony Edwards

"We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open."
-- Harry Edwards

"A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person."
--Barbara Ehrenreich

"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."
--

"I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes. What can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by words and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by racial bias."
--

"Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss."
-- Black Elk

"Children are all foreigners."
--

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body."
--

"There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him asleep."
--

"A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic."
--

"The definition of success--To laugh much; to win respect of intelligent persons and the affections of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give one's self; to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition.; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm, and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived--this is to have succeeded."
--

"Children are a poor man's riches."
--English proverb

"Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing."
-- William Feather

"All my children have spoken for themselves since they first learned to speak, and not always with my advance approval, and I expect that to continue in the future."
-- Gerald R. Ford

"Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak."
--

"Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt."
--

"Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework --an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life."
-- Betty Friedan

"Love your children with all your hearts, love them enough to discipline them before it is too late. ... Praise them for important things, even if you have to stretch them a bit. Praise them a lot. They live on it like bread and butter and they need it more than bread and butter."
-- Lavina Christensen Fugal

"Every child is born a genius."
--R. Buckminster Fuller

"It is dangerous to confuse children with angels."
-- David Fyfe

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself... You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."
-- Kahlil Gibran

"Keep me away from the wisdom that does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children."
-- Kahlil Gibran

"Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children."
-- Katherine Graham

"In the life of children there are two very clear-cut phases, before and after puberty. Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work: after puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious, tyrannical, insufferable. Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late: then of course the stick and violence enter the scene and yield very few results indeed. Why not instead take an interest in the child during the first period?"
-- Antonio Gramsci

"It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation."
-- John Gray

"Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today."
-- Thomas Gray

"I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex."
-- Jack Handey

"Few things can transform us as quickly as the presence of a child."
-- Tobin Hart

"Children can be our spiritual teachers if we pay attention."
-- Tobin Hart

"As we struggle to understand the contemporary world, to find a moral compass, to overcome selfishness, to develop character and compassion, and to uncover our calling, we may find a wellspring very close to home, in the authentic spiritual life of children."
-- Tobin Hart

"I must say the biggest lesson you can learn in life, or teach your children, is that life is not castles in the skies, happily ever after. The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth."
-- Goldie Hawn

"Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world."
-- Shirley Hazzard

"The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."
-- Theodore M. Hesburgh

"Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue prints of your ultimate accomplishments."
-- Napolean Hill

"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings."
-- Carter Hodding

"I like trying [to get pregnant]. I'm not so sure about childbirth."
-- Lauren Holly

"A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"It is a wise child that knows his own father."
-- Homer

"Children are our most valuable natural resource."
-- Herbert Clark Hoover

"Don't take up a man's time talking about the smartness of your children; he wants to talk to you about the smartness of his children."
-- Edgar Watson Howe

"Children need love, especially when they don't deserve it."
-- Harold Hulbert

"Each child is an adventure into a better life --an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new."
-- Hubert H. Humphrey

Bacio

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My Favorite Poetry for Children by Caroline Kennedy

	Amy Packham BellaOnline's Quotations Editor