Child Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

If you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and child, and not in opposition to 'em.

Charles Dickens

"Tut, tut, child," said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."

Always admired men who had many women. It must be that to a child of a dissatisfied woman the idea of monogamy is hollow.

To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.

Arthur Conan Doyle

When a child is born its sense-organs are brought in contact with the outer world. The waves of sound, heat, and light beat upon its feeble body, its sensitive nerve-fibres quiver, the muscles contract and relax in obedience: a gasp, a breath, and in this act a marvelous little engine, of inconceivable delicacy and complexity of construction, unlike any on earth, is hitched to the wheel-work of the Universe.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

After many requests on my part the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, commonly called the Wages and Hours Bill. That Act—applying to products in interstate commerce-ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over hours of labor. Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country. Without question it starts us toward a better standard of living and increases purchasing power to buy the products of farm and factory.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test; we know that's not true.

One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first.

Malala Yousafzai

Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.

If sometimes our poor people have had to die of starvation, it is not that God didn't care for them, but because you and I didn't give, were not an instrument of love in the hands of God, to give them that bread, to give them that clothing; because we did not recognize him, when once more Christ came in distressing disguise, in the hungry man, in the lonely man, in the homeless child, and seeking for shelter.

Not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves.

John F. Kennedy

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

George Bernard Shaw

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class. It is our unfinished task to restore the basic bargain that built this country — the idea that if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can get ahead, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, or who you love. It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation.

As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

William Shakespeare

Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are and then make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else's lie, not even your child's. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you become yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A bird sings, a child prattles, but it is the same hymn; hymn indistinct, inarticulate, but full of profound meaning.

When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.

As a general rule—never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

"Peggotty!" repeated Miss Betsey, with some indignation. "Do you mean to say, child, that any human being has gone into a Christian church, and got herself named Peggotty?"

Charles Dickens

And, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

Charles Dickens