It should be noted that children’s games are not merely games. One should regard them as their most serious activities.
Michel de Montaigne – Children
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
George Eliot – Children, Marriage
Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
George Eliot – Children, Heroes
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
Gaston Bachelard – Children, Life
Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.
G.K. Chesterton – Children
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde – Children
Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
Sigmund Freud – Children, Egoism
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
Benjamin Franklin – Education and Children
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
John Ruskin – Children, Society
Children see in their parents the past, their parents see in them the future; and if we find more love in the parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad but natural. Who does not entertain his hopes more than his recollections.
John Ruskin – Children, Parents
My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Charles Dickens – Children
What gift has providence bestowed on man that is so dear to him as his children?
Marcus Tulius Cicero – Children, Family
A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Parenthood
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin – Children
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
