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.
—Jeremy Taylor
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.
—Graham Greene (1904–91) British Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer
It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) French Historian, Political Scientist
What guides us is children’s response, their joy in learning to dance, to sing, to live together. It should be a guide to the whole world.
—Yehudi Menuhin (1916–99) American-born British Violinist, Conductor
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.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer
Children, taught either years beneath their intelligence or miles wide of relevance to it, or both: their intelligence becomes hopelessly bewildered, drawn off its centers, bored, or atrophied.
—James Agee (1909–55) American Journalist, Poet, Screenwriter, Film Critic
Blessed be the hand that prepares a pleasure for a child, for there is no saying when and where it may bloom forth.
—Douglas William Jerrold (1803–57) English Writer, Dramatist, Wit
What is a home without children?. Quiet.
—Henny Youngman (1906–98) Anglo-American Comedian, Violinist
We’ve had bad luck with our kids—they’ve all grown up.
—Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American Novelist, Essayist
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
The Work reveals that what you think shouldn’t have happened should have happened. It should happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn’t mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle. No one wants their children to get sick, no one wants to be in a car accident; but when these things happen, how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them? We know better than to do that, yet we do it, because we don’t know how to stop.
—Byron Katie (b.1942) American Speaker, Author
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.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927–2014) Colombian Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
—R. D. Laing (1927–89) Scottish Psychiatrist
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.
—Haim Ginott
There are only two things a child will share willingly; communicable diseases and its mother’s age.
—Benjamin Spock (1903–98) American Pediatrician, Author
Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other.
—E. W. Howe (1853–1937) American Novelist, Editor
How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man.
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (c.43 BCE–c.18 CE) Roman Poet
The knowingness of little girls hidden underneath their curls.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
Children have but little charity for one another’s defects
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Lord, give to men who are old and rougher the things that little children suffer, and let keep bright and undefiled the young years of the little child.
—John Masefield (1878–1967) English Poet, Novelist, Playwright
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.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
Children have more need of models than of critics.
—Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French Writer, Moralist
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
The easy way to teach children the value of money is to borrow from them.
—Anonymous
If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian Physician, Educator
Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life. Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable, immobile world.
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French Philosopher, Psychoanalyst, Poet
The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar