more quotations and passages on children

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

Haim Ginott

Children don't just come to us; they come for us. They come into our
lives and show us where our capacity to love can still use improvement.
They shine a spotlight on our wounds and force us to deal with them.
They minister to our souls' growth and our personal growth even if we don't
like it. The alternative is to pass on the dis-ease, to leave them an
inheritance that they'll have to sort out and try not to hand to the next
generation. We have to let these small ministers do their very big work.

Laura Berman Fortgang

Unfortunately, we're used to thinking of childhood as a period of blindness
and inadequacy, not as the richest time of all. And yet, to convince yourself
that it's so all you have to do is look carefully into the eyes of a newborn baby.
Try it if you get the chance; forget preconceptions and observe the child closely.
How do the eyes seem to you? Empty, unconscious? Or ancient, distant, wise?
Babies naturally know how to breathe deeply; it's we adults who have lost this
ability. At the age of four or five I had as yet learned nothing about God or
religion, nor about any of the fine messes people have made in their name.

Susanna Tamaro

Know ye what it is to be a child? 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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

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

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

Socrates

Genius is childhood recaptured.

Charles Baudelaire

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

We have to get children to understand that not
only do they have this incredible uniqueness,
but they also have something that sometimes
we forget about. They are also potentiality.
They are much more undiscovered than they
are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It
doesn't matter where they are, they're only just
beginning and the big magical trip of life is
digging it all out and discovering
the wonderful you.

Leo Buscaglia

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

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

Children are a wonderful gift. They are young and small persons with minds
and ideas, hating to be talked down to. They have an extraordinary capacity
to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

Desmond Tutu

Whatever they grow up to be, they are still our children, and the one most important
of all the things we can give to them is unconditional love. Not a love that
depends on anything at all except that they are our children.

Rosaleen Dickson

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I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom.
It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power
to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of
inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that
decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.

Haim Ginott

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow,
yet we forget that that child is someone today.

Stacia Tauscher

Children need love, especially when
they do not deserve it.

Harold Hulbert

A child can ask questions that a wise
person cannot answer.

unattributed

If you haven't time to respond to a tug at your
pants leg, your schedule is too crowded.

Robert Brault

Do not confine your children to your own learning,
for they were born in another time.

Hebrew proverb

The best inheritance one can give to one's children is a few minutes of one's time each day.

O. A. Battista

Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where
home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.

Jonas Salk

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

Angela Schwindt

Giving kids clothes and food is one of thing, but it's much more important to
teach them that other people besides themselves are important and that the best
thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.

Dolores Huerta

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it
and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Carl Jung

A low self-love in the parent desires that his or her child should repeat
his or her character and fortune. I suffer whenever I see that common
sight of a parent or senior imposing his or her opinion and way of
thinking and being on a young soul to which he or she is totally unfit.
Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way?
You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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