quotations about children
Children see magic because they look for it.
CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
You should never take responsibility for more children than you can give attention to.
JAMES REDFIELD
The Celestine Prophecy
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
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
Children are natural mimics. They act like their parents in spite of every attempt to teach them good manners.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Many children, many cares; no children, no felicity.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Every child lives up to the expectation you have for him.
KEVIN LEMAN
Have a New Kid by Friday
We can't control everything thing our kids do. Sooner or later they're just gonna do what they're gonna do. They're like people that way.
ROSEANNE BARR
"Bird is the Word", Roseanne
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
Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"A Defence of Baby-Worship,", The Defendant
Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
attributed, Pearls of Wisdom
Nobody's born rotten. You just don't have bad kids. It's not true. There is no such thing. But we can make them bad.
JEAN LIEDLOFF
interview, Touch the Future, fall 1998
Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.
PAUL REISER
Good Housekeeping, 1997
I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.
CHARLES LAMB
"A Bachelor's Complaint", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.
FRANK WARREN
attributed, The Little Red Book of Hope
Your children are not little mirrors reflecting back the good or bad job you've done.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, May 17, 2014
If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
P.D. JAMES
The Children of Men
Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims