A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.
As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children
Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaken need for an unshakable God.
Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
It's fun being a kid.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
There is a sanctity involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
You see much more of your children once they leave home.
There is no sinner like a young saint.
It is amazing how quickly the kids learn to drive a car, yet are unable to understand the lawnmower, snow-blower, or vacuum cleaner.
Wen I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away my childish things. [I Corinthians]
— Bible
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. [Luke 17:2]
— Bible
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. [Proverbs 22:15]
— Bible
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.
Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.
Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.
The only moral lesson which is suited for a child, the most important lesson for every time of life, is this: Never hurt anybody.
But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.
If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.
The first duty to children is to make them happy, If you have not made them so, you have wronged them, No other good they may get can make up for that.
A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie. Children have been treated. as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.
Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.
Young people should be helped, sheltered, ignored, and clubbed of necessary.
— Capp, Al
There are few successful adults who were not first successful children.
There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
Children have more need of models than of critics.
It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.
Even though your kids will consistently do the exact opposite of what you're telling them to do, you have to keep loving them just as much.
For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.
Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone, or forbid your children to do it.
It takes three to make a child.
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.
Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.
When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
Discipline is a symbol of caring to a child. He needs guidance. If there is love, there is no such thing as being too tough with a child. A parent must also not be afraid to hang himself. If you have never been hated by your child, you have never been a parent.
It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.
Hugs can do great amounts of good -- especially for children.
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
Children are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us temporarily for the purpose of loving them and instilling a foundation of values on which their future lives will be built.
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.
You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.
— Dogen
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.
Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.
We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.
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.
Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
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.
There never was a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him asleep.
The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.
Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them?
Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.
When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.
Let the child's first lesson be obedience, and the second will be what thou wilt.
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
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.
It is dangerous to confuse children with angels.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. 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.
We cannot fashion our children after our desires, we must have them and love them as God has given them to us.
If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.
Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come nor care beyond today.
Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.
We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.
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.
Children always turn to the light.
A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will, and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like the artist, he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone.
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.
Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.
A child's education should begin at least one hundred years before he is born.
Children are our most valuable natural resource.
Kids are wonderful, but I like mine barbecued.
Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
Children need love, especially when they don't deserve it.
Each child is an adventure into a better life --an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.
Those who have lost an infant are never, in a way, without an infant.
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.
Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.
You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.
Children need models rather than critics.
Normally, children learn to gauge rather accurately from the tone of their parent's voice how seriously to take his threats. Of course, they sometimes misjudge and pay the penalty.
Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.
A child miseducated is a child lost.
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in there having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved free of corruption from an early age.
A child learns to discard his ideals, whereas a grown-up never wears out his short pants.
Children enjoy the present because they have neither a past nor a future.
We inevitably doom our children to failure and frustration when we try to set their goals for them.
When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.
A child is fed with milk and praise.
What the vast majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to. In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.
Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
The secret of dealing successfully with a child is not to be its parent.
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
Too often when give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before.
She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
My mother loved children -- she would have given anything if I had been one.
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
What is done to children, they will do to society.
A little less worry over the child and a bit more concern about the world we make for the child to live in.
A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.
For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
We've had bad luck with our kids -- they've all grown up.
He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy.
Viewing the child solely as an immature person is a way of escaping comforting him.
Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, and that's what parents were created for.
Where children are, there is the golden age.
— Novalis
Before you beat a child, be sure yourself are not the cause of the offense.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.
— Ovid
The best way to keep children at home is to make the home a pleasant atmosphere and let the air out of the tires.
Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.
The wildest colts make the best horses.
— Plutarch
Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.
If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.
Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.
Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
There is not so much comfort in having children as there is sorrow in parting with them.
— Proverb
Children and drunks always speak the truth.
— Proverb
A rich child often sits in a poor mothers lap.
— Proverb
Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.
Children suck the mother when they are young and the father when they are old.
Better a snotty child than his nose wiped off.
Children are poor men's riches.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.
Childhood is the sleep of reason.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it
The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.
Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
— Saki
Adults are obsolete children.
Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.
In all our efforts to provide advantages we have actually produced the busiest, most competitive, highly pressured, and over-organized generation of youngsters in our history.
You save an old man and you save a unit; but save a boy, and you save a multiplication table.
What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mother and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
There are few places outside his own play where a child can contribute to the world in which he finds himself. His world: dominated by adults who tell him what to do and when to do it --benevolent tyrants who dispense gifts to their good subjects and punishment to their bad ones, who are amused at the cleverness of children and annoyed by their stupidities.
Children are the keys of paradise.
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.
It needs courage to let our children go, but we are trustees and stewards and have to hand them back to life--to God. As the old saying puts it: What I gave I have. We have to love them and lose them.
If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
With children... it is a fact that most parents criticize children more than they laud or congratulate them. We tend to be quick to criticize, slow to praise. We should be careful to keep the praise and the expectations far ahead of the criticism.
Little girl's definition of conscience: Something that makes you tell your mother before your brother or sister does.
Kids use to ask where they came from, now they tell you where to go
Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.
Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.
What you don't know takes a lot of explaining to the children.
The best way for a man to train up a child in the way he should go is to travel that way himself.
Too many parents are not on spanking terms with their children.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
A three year old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm.
Never have children, only grand children.
Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.
Birds in their little nest agree; and 'Tis a shameful sight, when children of one family fall out, and chide, and fight.
Americans, indeed, often seem to be so overwhelmed by their children that they'll do anything for them except stay married to the co-producer.
There's no point in being grown up if you cant be childish sometimes.
— Who, Dr.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children. Now I have six children and no theories.
The child is the father of the man.
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.
When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.