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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:

To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.

Dejan Stojanovic

If children have interests then education happens.

Arthur C. Clarke

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

Dr. Seuss

So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.

Ursula K. Le Guin The Farthest Shore (1972)

In the Borderlands, sheepherder, if a man has the raising of a child, that child is his, and none can say different.

Robert Jordan The Great Hunt (1990)

If you say children wouldn't know anything about masturbation on their own, you've never changed a little boy's diaper.

Joycelyn Elders

I find it rather difficult in the evening of my life to recollect everything that happened as time has erased from memory many things, especially relating to childhood and youth.

Georgy Zhukov The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (1971)

Consider little children. There are not many of them not cute and lovable and precious, sweet as whipped honey and butter. So where do all the wicked people come from?

Glen Cook The Black Company (1984)

I've done my bit by having six children, so now you do yours.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy talked about how she spent her childhood thinking that real life would start after the surgeries stopped.

Ann Patchett

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.

Garrison Keillor Leaving Home‎ (1987)

The childish egotism I had not yet outgrown flared up inside me in terrific jealousy. Children, after all, always resent their loved ones associating with outsiders.

Chinghiz Aitmatov Jamilia (1958)

Before commencing this work I had begun to realize how children follow the Spirit.

Fritz von Uhde

We don't criticize them, so why criticize Walter Keane just because his symbol of humanity is a child?

Walter Keane

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

Desmond Tutu The Words of Desmond Tutu (1984)

I'd like them (Mainland Chinese) to live here (Kinmen) too. I hope someday they can buy property here and their children could come to school here.

Wu Cherng-dean Wu Cherng-dean (2016)

The time is — time. The place is anywhere.
The voices speak to you across the air
To say that once again a child is born.
A child is born.

Stephen Vincent Benét A Child is Born (1942)

If ordinary means I have suddenly got to produce a household of kids and iron Peter's shirts, I'm sorry, I'm not interested.

Helen Clark

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Ernest Dimnet

If we can protect kids (from COVID-19 pandemic) – one, it's good for them, but two, it's good for the population. If it does penetrate the pediatric population, that might amplify the outbreak.

Aaron Michael Milstone Aaron Michael Milstone (2020)

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