CHILDREN QUOTES II

HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

F. PAUL WILSON, The Tomb

Children, no matter how gifted, can't see far into the future, you know. To them, a year is almost a lifetime, and telling them that things will be fine when they grow up does no good at all.

Children consume and fracture our lives. Children drag us towards disaster, it's unavoidable. When you see those laughing couples casting off into the sea of matrimony, you say to yourself, they have no idea, poor things, they just have no idea, they're happy. No one tells you anything when you start out. I have an old school pal who's just about to have a child with his new girlfriend. I said to him, "A child, at your age, are you insane?" The ten or dozen good years left to us before we get cancer or a stroke, and you're going to bugger yourself up with some brat?

Boys have a period of mischief as much as they have measles or chicken-pox.

Most children feel immortal--they have no sense that they're ever going to die. For a child, even growing up is something that's barely comprehensible.

That energy which makes a child hard to manage is the energy which afterward makes him a manager of life.

Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others. As long as its spell lasts, the only in-between which can insert itself between two lovers is the child, love's own product. The child, this in-between, to which the lovers now are related and which they hold in common, is representative of the world in that it also separates them; it is an indication that they will insert a new world into the existing world. Through the child, it is as though the lovers return to the world from which their love had expelled them. But this new worldliness, the possible result and the only possibly happy ending of a love affair, is, in a sense, the end of love, which must either overcome the partners anew or be transformed into another mode of belonging together.

And where, on earth, dwell hope and truth?

In childhood's uncorrupted heart;

Alas! too soon to guileless youth

The world doth its dark code impart!

Children keep a family together, especially when one can't get a babysitter.

A child is an uncut diamond.

Half the human race are taken out of the world as children. I think that proves God's great fondness for children as children.

Few are fit to train monkeys, yet not one of us but thinks himself competent to bring up children.

A childless man is like a loose engine in a ship. A man must be bolted and screwed to the community before he can work well for its advancement; and there are no such screws and bolts as children.

It is better to have only one son endowed with good qualities than a hundred devoid of them. For the moon though one, dispels the darkness, which the stars, though numerous, do not.

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That’s not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.

We know not what the child may become.

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