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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:

"I thought you said people see what they expect to see."
Children don't. Too often they see what's there.

Terry Pratchett Hogfather (1996)

I said...how, and why, young children, were sooner allured by love, than driven by beating, to attain good learning.

Roger Ascham The Schoolmaster (1570)

Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind;
But fathers that bear bags
Shall see their children kind.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Friedrich Schiller

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today.

Thomas Gray Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742)

Ay, these young things lie safe in our hearts just so long
As their wings are in growing; and when these are strong
They break it, and farewell! the bird flies!

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be past,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.

Isaac Watts Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Patrick Rothfuss The Name of the Wind (2007)

If you really look at it, there's no way your life could be more messed up than by having a child who can't take care of themselves.

James D. Watson

Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born?

Andrew Marvell

If there is anything that will endure
The eye of God, because it still is pure,
It is the spirit of a little child,
Fresh from his hand, and therefore undefiled.

Richard Henry Stoddard

If they (children) smash, the flower vase assumes a smile
while turning into pieces.
For a chance to be spilled by their hands,
anything they hold gets spilled itself full of happiness.
For a chance to play with them,
water forgets about its own colourlessness.

Suman Pokhrel

Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.

Alice Meynell Childhood (1913)

I wonder–
didn’t the Creator really do injustice?
With a power to defeat everyone without any battle,
children are busy at play with the most beautiful moments of their life.
Once they grow conscious of it,
those moments will have gone away
never to return to them.

Suman Pokhrel

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Isaiah

We have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of her again. Therefore begone
Without our grace, our love, our benizon.

William Shakespeare King Lear (1608)

So for the mother’s sake the child was dear,
And dearer was the mother for the child.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A child's a plaything for an hour.

Charles Lamb

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