The best Quotes and Sayings about Children & Childhood

A child's voice, however honest and true, is meaningless to those who've forgotten how to listen.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.

Young boys should never be sent to bed... they always wake up a day older.

Children have got to be free to lead their own lives.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms, when his hands are empty.

I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.

Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.

Having a baby is like having a tattoo on your face. You kind of want to be committed.

This life is so complicated, until we see it through the eyes of a child.

Sometimes I wish I were a kid again; skinned knees are a lot easier to fix than a broken heart.

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up.

Do you remember in kindergarten how you'd meet a kid and know nothing about them, then 10 seconds later you're playing like you're best friends, because you didn't have to be anything but yourself? Singing with you felt like that.

Disneyland isn't designed just for children. When does a person stop being a child? Can you say that a child is ever entirely eliminated from an adult?

We stopped checking for monsters under our bed, when we realized they were inside us.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

He was waving. "Saukerl," she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a "Saumensch". I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

I could use a dream or a genie or a wish
To go back to a place much simpler than this

I'm not young enough to know everything.

There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

A two-year old is kind of like having a blender, but you don't have a top for it.

...when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window.

Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them.

If true and unconditional love exists in this world, then it has to be the love between a mother and a child.

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

The soul is healed by being with children.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

I think my mom put it best. She said, "Little girls soften their daddy's hearts."

An adult scientist is a kid who never grew up.

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
the slow result of life's decay,
To be once more a little child
for one bright summer day.

To my dear beautiful daughter,

I'm writing you a letter. That's right, a good old-fashioned letter. It's a lost art, really. I have a confession to make. I didn't like you very much at first. You were just this annoying, little blob. You smelled nice. Most of the time. But you didn't seem to have much interest in me. Which I, of course, found vaguely insulting.

It was just you and your mom against the world... funny how some things never change. So I cruised along, doing my thing, acting the fool, not really understanding how being a parent changes you. And I don't remember the exact moment everything changed. I just know that it did.

One minute I was impenetrable. Nothing could touch me. The next, my heart was somehow beating outside my chest, exposed to the elements. Loving you has been the most profound, intense, painful experience of my life. In fact, it's been almost too much to bear. As your father, I made a silent vow to protect you from the world, never realizing I was the one who would end up hurting you the most.

When I flash forward, my heart breaks. Mostly because I can't imagine you speaking of me with any sort of pride. How could you? Your father is a child in a man's body. He cares for nothing and everything at the same time. Noble in thought, weak in action. Something has to change. Something has to give. It's getting dark... too dark to see.

In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - it's the courage to raise one.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

A child's faith, such sweet innocence. And yet they say, wisdom oft comes from the mouths of babes.

Childhood is short and maturity is forever.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.