quotations about children
Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Human Condition
Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
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
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
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
Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
attributed, Say It With Style
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
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
Children go through life with same tact as tornado.
CHARLIE CHAN
Charlie Chan in The Secret Service
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"
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
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
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"