quotations about children
We teach children to save their money. As an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has value. But it is not positive; it does not lead the child into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save.
HENRY FORD
My Life and Work
A state, a community, caring first for all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as for their temporal well-being, has organized the primitive Eden.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember.
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Millstone
My friends with children say it's the quality of love that is so unique, the fact that you surrender yourself to love, and through that surrendering become transparent to your deepest feelings. Perhaps it's not having a child that is so striking, but that unconditional love, joy, happiness exist and finally, through the child, have a chance to be expressed. To finally, irrevocably love without holding anything back. Perhaps the magic--the love, happiness, fulfillment--existed in us all along like an underground river, but we could never see it or know it because we kept looking for it outside, in accomplishments, body sizes, and other people.
GENEEN ROTH
Appetites: On the Search for True Nourishment
Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.
ERMA BOMBECK
attributed, Forbes, 1991
A strange mixture of fear and joy comes with driving off from the hospital with your firstborn in the vehicle. There's a powerful sense of transition and new beginning, and yet fear as well. It's a fear closely attached to the question, "What do I do with this thing?" It's a healthy fear born out of an awareness of the fragility of new life.
CHRIS SEIDMAN
Little Buddy
Children need models more than they need critics.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.
G.K. CHESTERTON
"A Defence of Baby-Worship"
I want my children to have all the things I couldn't afford. Then I want to move in with them.
PHYLLIS DILLER
The Snark Handbook: Parenting Edition
I didn't want children because I didn't want them to suffer. I had a dog, which suffered enough. I don't even want a goldfish or a turtle. I have a desert plant in my house that needs a glass of water maybe once a year, which I can deliver.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
"Life's Work: An Interview with Marina Abramovic", Harvard Business Review, November 2016
If we would amend the world, we should mend our selves; and teach our children to be, not what we are, but what they should be.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Everyone should have kids. They are the greatest joy in the world. But they are also terrorists. You'll realize this as soon as they're born, and they start using sleep deprivation to break you.
RAY ROMANO
stand-up routine
The kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving ways.
RUSSELL A. BARKLEY
attributed, Dad's Wit and Wisdom: Quips and Quotes for Fantastic Fathers
How parents interact with each child as he or she enters the family circle determines in great part that child's final destiny.
KEVIN LEMAN
The Birth Order Book
The "Why?" cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child's mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child's smile, would read such words in vain: while for any one that has ever loved one true child, no words are needed. For he will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from GOD's hands, on whom no shadow of sin, and but the outermost fringe of the shadow of sorrow, has yet fallen: he will have felt the bitter contrast between the haunting selfishness that spoils his best deeds and the life that is but an overflowing love--for I think a child's first attitude to the world is a simple love for all living things: and he will have learned that the best work a man can do is when he works for love's sake only, with no thought of name, or gain, or earthly reward. No deed of ours, I suppose, on this side the grave, is really unselfish: yet if one can put forth all one's powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child's whispered thanks, and the airy touch of a little child's pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.
LEWIS CARROLL
introduction, Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Nothing you do for a child is ever wasted.
GARRISON KEILLOR
Leaving Home
Oh, kids are great! You can teach them to hate what you hate!
HOMER SIMPSON
The Simpsons
Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present