Child Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

On days like today, we need to resolve never to repeat mistakes like that again. We must resolve to always speak out against hatred and bigotry in all of its forms — whether taunts against the child of an immigrant farmworker or threats against a Muslim shopkeeper. We are Americans. Standing up for each other is what the values enshrined in the documents in this room compels us to do -– especially when it's hard. Especially when it's not convenient. That's when it counts. That's when it matters — not when things are easy, but when things are hard.

Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

Confronted with a film, the child hardly thinks at all... faced with some confused activity where human movement has pride of place. The beating of the heart, the to-and-fro of the eyes, supplant thought while the screen is showing the hero pursued by kidnappers or murderers and revolver shots explode in wads of cotton-wool.

I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom

The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.

I read "King Lear" soon after "Macbeth," and I shall never forget the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in which Gloster's eyes are put out. Anger seized me, my fingers refused to move, I sat rigid for one long moment, the blood throbbing in my temples, and all the hatred that a child can feel concentrated in my heart.

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

G. K. Chesterton

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

Florence Nightingale

Accepting the presidential nomination:

I see another child tonight. He hears a train go by. At night he dreams of faraway places where he'd like to go. It seems like an impossible dream.

The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

It is my dream that one day, great buildings like this one will exist in every corner of the world so every child can grow up with the opportunity to succeed.

Malala Yousafzai

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child's rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man's whore.

Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers? No one has a moral right to tell us to talk to childkillers.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe.

Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.

George Bernard Shaw

I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? "You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!"
"Well," I said, slightly nonplussed, "the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby."
What I felt like saying was, "I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?" But no — my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face... and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?

Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

William Shakespeare

We must not be surprised when we hear of murders, killings, of wars, or of hatred...If a mother can kill her own child, what is left but for us to kill each other?

I suppose every child has a world of his own — and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that's the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in Life?