Child Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

L. Sprague de Camp

In automobile terms, the child supplies the power but the parents have to do the steering.

No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.

The great man is the one who does not lose his [originally good] child's heart.

When our Lord says, we must be converted and become as little children, I suppose He means also, that we must be sensible of our weakness, comparatively speaking, as a little child.

George Whitefield

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply... For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to "write stories." Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.

Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee.

The angel of mercy, the child of love, together had flown to the realms above.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Gaston Bachelard

But man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Fear not, the child will not die.

Grigori Rasputin

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

The poor child was the drudge of the household, and was always in the wrong. He was, however, the most bright and discreet of all the brothers; and if he spoke little, he heard and thought the more.

Charles Perrault

It is a masterpiece of the devil to make us believe that children cannot understand religion. Would Christ have made a child the standard of faith if He had known that it was not capable of understanding His words?

Dwight L. Moody

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

A truly appreciative child will break, lose, spoil, or fondle to death any really successful gift within a matter of minutes.

Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great.

You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.

Frederick Buechner

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

No matter how old we become, we can still call them 'Holy Mother' or 'Father' and put a child-like trust in them (or their agents, who often adopt similar titles for themselves).

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.