quotations about children
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
There is more in the education of children than the everlasting iteration of the word "don't!"
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
And where, on earth, dwell hope and truth?
In childhood's uncorrupted heart;
Alas! too soon to guileless youth
The world doth its dark code impart!
ANNE S. BUSHBY
"The Morn of Life"
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
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
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
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
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
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Say It With Style