Inspirational Quotes on Children

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

“Children do need the guidance of their parents, and we guide them more by the example we set than by any other way. We need to be firm and sane and fair and consistent—and, above all, we need to discipline in a spirit of love.”

“Children, pray for the salvation of your parents.”

“Ruth once wrote, “Dear Journal, Never let a single day pass without saying an encouraging word to each child . . .‘More people fail for lack of encouragement,’ someone wrote, ‘than for any other reason.”

“Children respect discipline. They want to be guided. It gives them a sense of belonging, a sense of security.”

“A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.”

“Children must be taught obedience just as much as they need to be taught to read and write.”

“We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”

“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.”

“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”

“Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.”

“Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.”

“There is nothing that moves a loving father's soul quite like his child's cry.”

“Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.”

“Wisdom is justified by all her children. Luke 7:35”

“The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.”

“Woe to the man who offends a small child!”

“The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.”

“and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.”

“Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues — faith and hope.”