quotations and passages about children

Every child comes with
the message that God is not yet discouraged of us.

Rabindranath Tagore

I love little children, and it is not a slight thing when they,
who are fresh from God, love us.

Charles Dickens

Sometimes looking deep into the eyes of a child, you are conscious of meeting a glance full
of wisdom. The child has known nothing yet
but love and beauty. All this piled-up world knowledge you have acquired is unguessed at
by her. And yet you meet this wonderful look
that tells you in a moment more than all the
years of experience have seemed to teach.

Hildegarde Hawthorne

Those who help a child help humanity with an immediateness
which no other help given to human creature in any other
stage of human life can possibly give again.

Phillips
Brooks

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love
of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real living of life with the feeling of freedom and self-expression. Play is the business
of childhood, and its continuation in later years is the prolongation of youth.

Walter Rauschenbach

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.

Khalil Gibran

Our religion is one which challenges the ordinary human standards
by holding that the ideal of life is the spirit of a little child. We tend
to glorify adulthood and wisdom and worldly prudence, but the Gospel
reverses all this. The Gospel says that the inescapable condition
of entrance into the divine fellowship is that we turn and become
as a little child. As against our natural judgment we must become
tender and full of wonder and unspoiled by the hard skepticism
on which we so often pride ourselves. But when we really look
into the heart of a child, willful as he or she may be, we are often
ashamed. God has sent children into the world, not only to replenish it,
but to serve as sacred reminders of something ineffably precious which
we are always in danger of losing.
The sacrament of childhood is thus a continuing revelation.

Elton Trueblood

When they tell you to grow up,
they mean stop growing.

Tom Robbins

Fran Lebowitz

I must take issue with the
term "a mere child,"
for it has been my invariable
experience that the company
of a mere child is infinitely
preferable to that of a mere adult.

I believe the powers of observation in numbers of very young children to be
quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most
grown people who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety
be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather,
as I generally observe such people to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness,
and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance
they have preserved from their childhood.

Charles Dickens

What the majority of American children needs is to stop being pampered,
stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered to.
In the final analysis, it is not what you do for your children but
what you have taught them to do for themselves
that will make them successful human beings.

Ann Landers

Love your children with all your hearts, love them enough
to discipline them before it is too late. . . Praise them for
important things, even if you have to stretch them a bit.
Praise them a lot. They live on it like bread and butter
and they need it more than bread and butter.

Lavina
Christensen
Fugal

To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood,
to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty
with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar,
this is the character and privilege of genius,
and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from
the person of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its soul.

Francis Thompson

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Every child should know a hill,
And the clean joy of running down its long slope
With the wind in his hair.
He should know a tree--
The comfort of its cool lap of shade,
And the supple strength of its arms
Balancing him between earth and sky
So he is a creature of both.
He should know bits of singing water--
The strange mysteries of its depths,
And the long sweet grasses that border it.
Every child should know some scrap
Of uninterrupted sky, to shout against;
And have one star, dependable and bright,
For wishing on.

Edna Casler Joll

For a Child

Your friends shall be the tall wind,
The river and the tree;
The sun that laughs and marches,
The swallow and the sea.

Your prayers shall be the murmur
Of grasses in the rain;
The song of wildwood thrushes
That makes God glad again.

And you shall run and wander
And you shall dream and sing
Of brave things and of bright things
Beyond the swallow's wing.

And you shall envy no man,
Nor hurt your heart with sighs,
For I will keep you simple
That God may make you wise.

Fanny Stearns Davis

And then I thought: what fools we are with our children--
always plotting what we shall make of them,
always planning for a future that never comes,
always intent on what they may be,
never accepting what they are.

Howard Vincent O'Brien

For the children of the world
Every single little boy and girl
Heaven plants a special seed
And we must have faith for these
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in the Father's eyes
Like the Father may we see
That they have a destiny
And give them the light of love to lead
Through the darkness around us now
To a place where hope is found

Sims/Grant/Kirkpatrick

Pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

Socrates

Genius is childhood recaptured.

Charles Baudelaire

There are two great injustices that can befall children.
One is to punish them for something they didn't do.
The other is to let them get away with doing something they know is wrong.

Robert Gardner

Every adult needs a child to teach; it's the way adults learn.

Frank A. Clark

Children are likely to live up
to what you believe of them.

Lady Bird Johnson

The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.

Joe Houldsworth

I have found that the best way to give advice to your children
is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it.

Harry S. Truman

Loving children doesn't mean giving in to all their whims;
to love them is to bring out the best in them,
to teach them to love what is difficult.

Nadia Boulanger

Children are like wet cement.
Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

Haim Ginott

If we had paid no more attention
to our plants than we have
to our children, we would now be
living in a jungle of weed.

Luther Burbank

Children are not casual guests in our home.
They have been loaned to us temporarily
for the purpose of loving them and instilling
a foundation of values on which
their future lives will be built.

James Dobson

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children
occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we neglected you.

We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions
on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence.

We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid
the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength.

We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part
in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling.

Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were
the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned
to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.

Midge Decter

The Kingdom of Ideas
Wilferd A. Peterson

To enter the Kingdom of Ideas, become as a little child.

"There is nothing more resembles God's eyes," wrote Nikos Kazantzakis, "than the eyes of a child."

A child has wide-eyed interest in everything. As God did, he looks upon the world and finds it good.

A child does not block the flow of goodness into her life by thoughts of fear and prejudice. Her mind is as open as are her eyes. She experiences the wonder of life.

A child is an explorer. He is curious. He wants to know what is on the other side of the moon, or the room. He investigates things to find out what they are and how they work. He asks questions. He loves to experiment.

A child lives in the world of fantasy where all great ideas are born. It was probably a child who first dreamed of flying through the air, hearing voices and music from the sky, penetrating to the ocean depths. Before the reality comes the dream.

A child has the magic gift of imagination. She sees things that aren't there. She creates in her mind the kind of a world she wants to live in. She visualizes things as she wants them to be.

A child has freshness of response. To him the world is ever new and full of miracles and adventures. He reacts spontaneously to the discoveries he makes each day.

A child follows the simple way. She does not become bogged down in the complex and the obscure. She is natural, direct and genuine.

A child is confident. He has not learned all of the reasons why a thing cannot be done. He ignores obstacles because he does not know they exist.

This we learn from the child: The more childlike we are in our approach to problems, the more creative we will be. Try the fresh approach of a child.

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music,
and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the
possibilities that lie within the human spirit--enable them to see visions
and dream dreams.

Eric Anderson

As far as the education of children is concerned I think
they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones.
Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution
but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness
and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbor and
self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.

Natalia Ginzburg

We must trust that what we're doing has a purpose.
We must realize that we're not here to make kids conform
or perform, but that we're here to help them to develop
their own unique skills and talents, not the ones we want
them to have or the ones we think they should have.

tom walsh