Quotes about Children

Where are you making for?  This is the question of our time. What is our vision?  What kind of world do we want, for ourselves, for our children, for our children's children?  What kind of world do we want for the fish and the birds, the beasts and the insects, the forests and the meadows, the crops that feed us and the flowers that bring us beauty?  I believe we want to create a world large enough to be a soul home for us and for all beings, loving and large enough to give expression to the soul of the world itself, spacious and whole enough to express the lengths of God.  And I believe we can.  The capacity to do so is innate in us.  If affairs are soul size, we can meet them because we are soul size, too.

The essence of compassion is to copy how you relate with your child (in your relationships with others). The problem is how much you want to be the head of the family or the ringleader of your friends. You know, if that ambition is not there, but you have a genuine willingness to share, that is precisely the concept of sangha, or the Buddhist community, in traditional terms. You are willing to be friends with everybody, but at the same time you are not particularly taking credit. You don’t make people depend on you. Everybody can stand on his or her own feet. The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.

Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

Nature is the Mother who will continue to teach us.
Her challenges are easily misinterpreted.
Hence we remain children to her.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Respect the child.  Wait and see the new product of Nature.  Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions.  Respect the child.  Be not too much his parent.  Trespass not on his solitude.

Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us.  Echoes.  Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages.  Dutifully, wearily now, they push us about in our chairs.
Our children don't know us as we are now.  Less do they know us as we were.  Oh, how I wish they could have known us as we were.  Do rou think they would recognize their young selves in our young selves?  I wish they could have seen us in all our clumsiness and selfishness, which is so like their own clumsiness and selfishness right now.  There's another echo for you.
We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it.  We were children loving our children.  And that's who we are still.

A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children, and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way.

'You're not like other children,' said my mother. 'And if you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.'
The eccentricities she described as mine were really her own. She was the one who hated going out. She was the one who couldn't live in the world she had been given. She longed for me to be free, and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.

'Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.'
'I'm sure I didn't mean - ' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.
'That's just what I complain of!  You should have meant!  What do you suppose is the use of child without any meaning?  Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hope.

'Speak when you're spoken to!' The Queen sharply interrupted her.
'But if everybody obeyed that rule,' said Alice, who was always ready for a little argument, 'and if you only spoke when you were spoken to, and the other person always waited for you to begin, you see nobody would ever say anything, so that -- '
'Ridiculous!' cried the Queen.  'Why, don't you see, child -- ' here she broke off with a frown, and, after thinking for a minute, suddenly changed the subject of the conversation. 

So young a child ought to know which way she's going, even if she doesn't know her own name!

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Children follow your footsteps, not your advice.

"Think about your childhood for a moment. What was your favorite outdoor place to play? What was that environment like? Do your memories evoke specific sights, scents, and sounds? What did you do there? What did it look like and feel like? Did this place change along with the seasons? What sort of games did you play and what did you discover there?

"Most of us have vivid memories of our favorite childhood play environment. This was the place where we began to discover the wonder of playful exploration. It was the place where we first interacted with the natural world. This place was our introduction to the environment, our community, and the cycles of life.

"The places that adults remember playing in as children are so often natural places - places with a stream, clumps of spongy moss, thick layers of slippery mud, fallen logs, or even a mound of dirt piled high in a vacant lot in the city. There is just something about connecting with the natural world that is so important for all people - particularly children. These are the kinds of experiences that nourish our souls.

"Unfortunately, these days many children don't have the kinds of opportunities that we had not so long ago. Our fast-paced culture now places greater emphasis on going, doing, and becoming, and less on wandering, searching, and discovering. With modern urban and suburban development, natural or wild areas are less available."

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. 

One must ask children and birds how strawberries and cherries taste.

Are we not witnessing a situation where children are conciously rejecting their parents' value despite love and devotion given to them? The present situation has arisen because parents have failed to transmit a sustaining faith to their children. The basic reason for this failure is that the parents themselves lacked faith. Without faith, their love was an image not a reality, a statement of words not an expression of feelings

Children aren`t happy without something to ignore, and that`s what parents were created for.

"The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn."

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently

Children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.

The three glues that hold humankind together are the courage of women, the compassion of men and the laughter of children.

Learning how to become emotionally literate is one of the best investments that human beings can make for themselves, their children, and the future.

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

You can't have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place. You can have conditioning and a Pavlovian conditioning of his dogs, or behaviors modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and we generally call learning, but it's not learning. It's conditioning. Real learning takes place by what Maria Montesorri would call the absorbent mind of the child. Simply absorbing their universe, absorbing it, becoming it, and they do this through play. Play can be the most serious undertaking of a child's life. It is the most serious undertaking. They are completely entrained in play. Mind, the three parts of the mind; thought, feeling, action, the body, every aspect of the child's self entrained solely focuses totally on the activity of absorbing their world. Absorbing their environment. It is the most serious active to their life because they're literally building their construction of knowledge of the world, of themselves, of the relationship between the two and laying down all the foundations for the later forms of intelligence.