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.

- Albert Einstein

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

- George Bernard Shaw

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

- Madeleine L'Engle

A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children

- The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

- Astrid Lindgren

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

- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

- Margaret Mead

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

- Oscar Wilde

The soul is healed by being with children.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

- Carl Sandburg

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

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.

- Khaled Hosseini

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

- Anna Quindlen

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

- Christopher Hitchens

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

- Robert A. Heinlein

Children see magic because they look for it.

- Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christopher Moore

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

- The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment.

- Rick Riordan

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

- Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

It's the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.

- Frank Warren

You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.

- Roman Payne

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets.

- Roald Dahl

The only love that I really believe in is a mother's love for her children.

- Karl Lagerfeld

Is the spring coming?" he said. "What is it like?"... "It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine...

- The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

When kids hit 1 year old, it's like hanging out with a miniature drunk. You have to hold onto them. They bump into things. They laugh and cry. They urinate. They vomit.

- Johnny Depp

Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.

- Stephen King

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.

- Emilie Buchwald

We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

- Fred Rogers

We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

- Great Speeches, Franklin D. Roosevelt

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

- Bill Ayers

You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you. But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew." - Pocahontas

- Walt Disney Company

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.

- Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

- Walt Whitman

I don't remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

- Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Anne Lamott

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

- The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

- Russell Brand

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

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.

- Matilda, Roald Dahl

Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.

- The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce

My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

- Frank Zappa

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.

- Phyllis Diller

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don't mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don't we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

- The Girl with No Shadow, Joanne Harris

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

- Angela Schwindt

You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are...off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.

- Elizabeth Berg

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

- Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.

- The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

- John Wilmot

Having children is like living in a frat house - nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there's a lot of throwing up.

- Ray Romano

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911.

- Erma Bombeck

If we are worried about the future, then we must look today at the upbringing of children.

- Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes, Gordon B. Hinckley

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

- All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

- Plato

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

- Maurice Sendak

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.

- North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?

- The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, John Boyne

All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

- Erma Bombeck

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.

- King of Thorns, Mark Lawrence

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

- Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Greg Mortenson

There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise.

- Brian Andreas

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.

- Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages, L.R. Knost

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

- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

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

- Peter De Vries

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

- Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter

She moved to pinch me again but I blocked her hand. I'm no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I'm pretty sure that's flirting.

- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs

Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.

- The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

- Norman Douglas

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

- Harry Edwards

I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.

- American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot, Craig Ferguson

Children show me in their playful smiles the divine in everyone.

- Michael Jackson

Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and, as it were, to guide us.

- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Children are capable of such open rudeness.

- The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart

The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken.

- Zombies Vs. Unicorns, Justine Larbalestier

There's nothing more contagious than the laughter of young children; it doesn't even have to matter what they're laughing about.

- Killosophy, Criss Jami

When she was a child, my love carried a road-map in her hand the way other girls carried handkerchiefs. She always knew the way. Her feet were little wings. And her beautiful head was a compass.

- Roman Payne

I wonder if other mothers feel a tug at their insides, watching their children grow up into the people they themselves wanted so badly to be.

- Keeping Faith, Jodi Picoult

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it

- Alexandre Dumas

Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?

- Michael Jackson

Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.

- A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L'Engle

Every child needs a champion.

- Hillary Rodham Clinton

The aspiration to save the world is a morbid phenomenon of today's youth.

- Marilyn Manson

We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?

- The Sunne in Splendour, Sharon Kay Penman

There are two kinds of travel: first class and with children.

- Pluck and Luck, Robert Benchley

When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children

- Pat Conroy

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

- Jane Goodall

Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.

- Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada

Each child's story is worthy of telling. There shouldn't be a sliding scale of death. The weight of it is crushing.

- Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Anderson Cooper

You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

- Marshall B. Rosenberg

What do your parents know, about surviving?

- The End, Lemony Snicket

Dope. They sell that shit to schoolkids. It's worse than that. How's that? Schoolkids buy it.

- No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

What we instill in our children will be the foundation upon which they build their future.

- Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience, Steve Maraboli

Anybody who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad.

- Leo Rosten

Gin a body meet a body Coming thro' the rye, Gin a body kiss a body— Need a body cry?

- Robert Burns

You should listen to even the smallest voice, someday it could be the one that makes a difference.

- Crystal Marcos

Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.

- Alice Waters

Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.

- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë