Quotes on Children

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit.

For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.

It is easy to say that you can adopt the whole human race as your children, but it is not the same as living in a home with a child and shaping all you do to help him learn to be happy and whole and good. Don't live your life without ever holding a child in your arms, on your lap, in your home, and feeling a child's arms around you and hearing his voice in your ear and seeing his smile, given to you because you put it into your heart.

It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children...

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

My husband's a pediatrician, so he and I talk about parenting all the time. You can't raise children who have more shame resilience than you do.

How can we expect our children to know and experience the joy of giving unless we teach them that the greater pleasure in life lies in the art of giving rather than receiving.

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

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans.... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

As parents, the most important thing we can do _x000D_ is read to our children early and often. Reading _x000D_ is the path to success in school and life. When _x000D_ children learn to love books, they learn to love _x000D_ learning.

Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves

I think a person has to believe in something,_x000D_ or search out some kind of faith;_x000D_ otherwise life is empty, nothing._x000D_ How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly,_x000D_ why children are born, why there are stars in the sky..._x000D_ Either you know why you live,_x000D_ or it's all small, unnecessary bits.

Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery

It all goes back and back," Tyrion thought, "to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.

When my children wake up in the morning they know they will eat breakfast, get hugs from their parents, go to a good, safe school. Plates are full and store windows are glittering. But at the same time the great majority of the world's children and women stand - no - shiver on the precipice

There is no experience like having children...If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

Play is a child's work and this is not a trivial pursuit.

A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.

It is one thing to open the schools to all children regardless of race. It is another to train the teachers, to build the classrooms, and to attempt to eliminate the effects of past educational deficiencies. It is still another to find ways to feed the incentive to learn and keep children in school.