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Children Quotes

A short page with no flagged entries, which is rare. Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Suman Pokhrel, Alice Meynell and Isaiah lead. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) asks what a simple child that lightly draws its breath and feels its life in every limb should know of death. Goldsmith’s The Traveller (1764) says the sports of children satisfy the child. Byron, in Beppo (1818), complains about them with the line that they always smell of bread and butter.

The sourced entries here are all poems, and every quote page shows the poem’s source and date.

Random quote on Children

Most quoted on children:

Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

So what if a kid dies? God will take care of him.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds (1916)

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Thomas Szasz The Second Sin (1973)

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice (1596)

Every child, at birth, is the Universal Man. But, as it grows, we turn it into "a petty man." It should be the function of education to turn it again into the original "Universal Man."

Kuvempu

Once positioned on their(children's) lips,
even the scariest of words
come out as a melodious lisp.

Suman Pokhrel

And though she be but little, she is fierce.

William Shakespeare

Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.

John F. Kennedy

— A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

William Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
And that cannot stop their tears.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems (1844)

Children have more need of models than of critics.

Joseph Joubert Pearls of Thought (1881)

All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.

Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

We speak of educating our children. Do we know that our children also educate us?

Lydia Sigourney Letters to Mothers (1838)

Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.

Alice Meynell Children of the Old Masters (Italian School) (1903)

A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.

A. S. Neill Summerhill (1960)

The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart.

George Edward Woodberry

Early experience conditions adult life; childhood is the precinct in which we learn the rituals of maturity.

Henry Hitchings

Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.

Novalis

Never despair of a child. The one you weep the most for at the mercy-seat may fill your heart with the sweetest joys.

Theodore L. Cuyler Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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