quotations about children
The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Madame Louise Colet, Dec. 11, 1852
That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A childless man is like a loose engine in a ship. A man must be bolted and screwed to the community before he can work well for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is more in the education of children than the everlasting iteration of the word "don't!"
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Most children feel immortal--they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible.
JOHN SAUL
Shadows
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
Children go through life with same tact as tornado.
CHARLIE CHAN
Charlie Chan in The Secret Service
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
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
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"
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Say It With Style
Have you never, when waves were breaking, watched children at sport on the beach,
With their little feet tempting the foam-fringe, till with stronger and further reach
Than they dreamed of, a billow comes bursting, how they turn and scamper and screech!
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology"
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