quotations about children
Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"A Defence of Baby-Worship,", The Defendant
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison'd the fountain.
JOHN LOCKE
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"There Was a Little Girl"
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Children go through life with same tact as tornado.
CHARLIE CHAN
Charlie Chan in The Secret Service
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Onion Girl
I wasn't really that informed about the two-year-old. Oh, I'd read about them, and occasionally I'd see documentaries on the Discovery Channel showing two-year-olds in the wild, where they belong.
RAY ROMANO
Everything and a Kite
A child's voice, however honest and true, is meaningless to those who've forgotten how to listen.
ALBUS DUMBLEDORE
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Say It With Style