88 Inspiring Child Quotes

In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, it's easy to overlook the pure and untainted wisdom that children often share. Their innocent perspectives remind us of the simple joys and profound truths that adults sometimes forget. Whether you're a parent, teacher, or someone who simply appreciates the candid and imaginative minds of children, this carefully curated collection of the top 88 inspiring child quotes is sure to warm your heart and spark your imagination. Let us take you on a journey through words that capture the essence of childhood wonder and reveal the powerful insights that even the youngest among us can offer.

1. “A torn jacket is soon mended, but hard words bruise the heart of a child.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

2. “Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.” - Ambrose Bierce

3. “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” - Mother Theresa of Calcutta

4. “The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

5. “Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman now, no more a girl. She had to personally respond to that emotional humiliation, or the scars from it would haunt her to her grave, forever paralyzing her along her path to discover her true potential in life.” - R.A. Salvatore

6. “I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.” - Anne Fadiman

7. “My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.” - Anne Fadiman

8. “Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.” - Leo Tolstoy

9. “You are a child of mine,Born of my own design,And you bear the hard of life.No matter where you go,Oh, you will always know,That you've been made free in Christ,And you are a child of mine! ” - Mark Schultz

10. “He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.” - Alice Sebold

11. “He had the hypocrisy to represent a mourner: and previous to following with Hareton, he lifted the unfortunate child on to the table and muttered, with peculiar gusto, 'Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!” - Emily Brontë

12. “Let children alone... the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose.” - Charlotte Mason

13. “This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.” - Cormac McCarthy

14. “A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.” - Robertson Davies

15. “Memories particularly of when they weren’t being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you’re-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family’s life when they could reach one another in calm” - Philip Roth

16. “I tramp the perpetual journeyMy signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again. This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself. Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence. Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.” - Walt Whitman

17. “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, Mother, what was war?” - Eve Merriam

18. “Is adult amusement killing our children, or is killing our children amusing adults?” - Marilyn Manson

19. “Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

20. “No, Miss Wright didn't want to meet her kid. To her, that relationship was just as important, just as ideal and impossible as it would be to the child. She'd expect that young man to be perfect, smart, and talented, everything to compensate for all the mistakes that she'd made. The whole wasted, unhappy mess of her life.” - Chuck Palahniuk

21. “Fathers. Mothers. With all their caring and attention. They will f--- you up, every time.” - Chuck Palahniuk

22. “I'm Razo, a member of Bayern's Own," he said, stopping himself from adding "Loafing is just a hobby of mine.""Bayern's Own? But you're a child." Razo looked up to the sky. "I'm not a child, I'm just short.” - Shannon Hale

23. “But it was my parents I longed for mostly. I wanted to be a little girl again and cuddle into them, wriggling in between them like I'd done in their bed when I was three or four, snug and warm in the safest place in the world.Instead I had Hell.” - John Marsden

24. “A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

25. “Your typical Six-year-old is a paradoxical little person, and bipolarity is the name of his game.” - Louise Bates Ames

26. “In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.” - Jodi Picoult

27. “Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.” - Stefan Zweig

28. “And no child deserved to die for defending her father, no matter who she was” - Janice Hardy

29. “one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.” - Audrey Niffenegger

30. “Children see magic because they look for it.” - Christopher Moore

31. “When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.” - Jodi Picoult

32. “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.(translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna)” - Heraclitus

33. “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” - Rabindranath Tagore

34. “Before Elijah could raise a nation from the dead, he raised just one dead child.” - Lou Engle

35. “If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.” - Emma Donoghue

36. “I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.” - Charles Bukowski

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

38. “Her soft trailing fingers would continue to attempt a connection that I refused to allow; that I couldn’t allow if I wanted to survive.” - J.D. Stroube

39. “Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life.” - Jodi Picoult

40. “The shame and the downfall of a modern materialistic society is her inability to treasure, care for, admire, adore, cherish, value, revere, respect, uphold, uplift, protect, shield, defend, safeguard, treasure and love her children. I praise all the cultures of this world that naturally harbor and actively manifest these instincts. If a nation or if a population of people fails to recognize the excellent value and distinction of the lives of her children and is defective enough to have lost the capability of expressing and acting upon these instincts then there is nothing that can save that nation or those people. The prosperity of a people is not measured in banks, financial markets, economy and the death of its humanity is evident not through the loss of life but in the loss of love for its children.” - C. JoyBell C.

41. “They had always dreamed of a large family but have now realized that they would be equally blessed to have even one child.” - Jane Green

42. “A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.” - Shannon L. Alder

43. “I know I'll never marry, never risk bringing a child into the world. Because if there's one thing being a victor doesn't guarantee, it's our children's safety. My kids' names would go right into the reaping balls with everyone else's. And I swear I'll never let that happen.” - Suzanne Collins

44. “When a woman gives birth her waters break and she pours out the child and the child runs free.” - Jeanette Winterson

45. “I realized that I'm a child."William looked point-blank at her chest. "No.” - Ilona Andrews

46. “Sorry, pigtails, but subtlety isn't an option anymore.” - T. A. Miles

47. “The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.The moral of the story?Kids are smart.” - Vera Nazarian

48. “This is heaven my child.” - Santosh Kalwar

49. “Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.” - Gabriela Mistral

50. “Child, child, love while you can The voice and the eyes and the soul of a man; Never fear though it break your heart-Out of the wound new joy will start; Only love proudly and gladly and well, Though love be heaven or love be hell.Child, child, love while you may, For life is short as a happy day; Never fear the thing you feel-Only by love is life made real; Love, for the deadly sins are seven, Only through love will you enter heaven.” - Sara Teasdale

51. “She grinned, looking for all the world like a sticky-mouthed little girl who had just convinced her gullible mother that she really did drop the first piece of candy into the storm drain and would need another.” - Wendy Corsi Staub

52. “Why isn't there a commandment to "honor thy children" or at least one to "not abuse thy children"? The notion that we must honor our parents causes many people to bury their real feelings and set aside their own needs in order to have a relationship with people they would otherwise not associate with. Parents, like anyone else, need to earn respect and honor, and honoring parents who are negative and abusive is not only impossible but extremely self-abusive. Perhaps, as with anything else, honoring our parents starts with honoring ourselves. For many adult children, honoring themselves means not having anything to do with one or both of their parents.” - Beverly Engel

53. “...his lazy eye drifting around the room like a child looking for the bathroom.” - Chuck Klosterman

54. “As a child, I was afraid of the dark and the monsters on the outside.As a man, I run away from the light, afraid to show the monsters within.” - Anthony Liccione

55. “When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” - Margery Williams Bianco

56. “Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced...And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful...And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.” - Ted Hughes

57. “She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them. [...] This naive combination in her of the child and the thinking woman, this childlike and absolutely genuine thirst for truth and justice, and absolute faith in her impulses--all this lighted up her face with a fine glow of sincerity, giving it a lofty, spiritual beauty, and one began to understand that it was not so easy to gauge the full significance of that beauty which was not all at once apparent to every ordinary unsympathetic eye.” - Feodor Dostoevsky

58. “That girl is a grade one a-hole with a severe attitudinal problem.” - Wild Child

59. “from a child in danger to a dangerous child” - Edward Humes

60. “You stupid, conceited fool! You know nothing! You're like a child, blind to everything but its own empty stomach! Well, grow up, Carl, and join the real world. Until you do, for God's sake leave me be!” - Amanda Browning

61. “Growing Literacy of the Heart and Mind Cultivates the Landscape of a Child's Future.” - Clyde Heath

62. “Μια αιτία για τη δημιουργία νεύρωσης μπορεί να βρεθεί στο γεγονός ότι το παιδί έχει μια μητέρα που το αγαπάει μεν αλλά είναι υπερβολικά επιεικής ή αυταρχική απέναντί του κι έναν πατέρα αδύνατο και αδιάφορο. Σ'αυτήν την περίπτωση το παιδί μπορεί να παραμείνει προσκολλημένο σε μαι πρώιμη μητρική πρόσδεση και να εξελιχθεί σε ένα άτομο που εξαρτάται από τη μητέρα, νιώθει αδύναμο και έχει τις χαρακτηριστικές τάσεις του ανθρώπου-αποδέκτη που έχει ανάγκη να παίρνει, να προστατεύεται, να φροντίζεται, και που του λείπουν οι πατρικές ιδιότητες -πειθαρχία, ανεξαρτησία, ικανότητα να κατακτήσει τη ζωή μόνος του.” - Έριχ Φρομ

63. “So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.” - Carl Sandburg

64. “A child's cry touches a father's heart, and our King is the Father of his people. If we can do no more than cry it will bring omnipotence to our aid. A cry is the native language of a spiritually needy soul; it has done with fine phrases and long orations, and it takes to sobs and moans; and so, indeed, it grasps the most potent of all weapons, for heaven always yields to such artillery.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

65. “There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.” - Mizuki Nomura

66. “To risk life to save a smile on a face of a woman or a child is the secret of chivalry.” - Dejan Stojanovic

67. “Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's me And who is the poet writing this poem? That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles” - Pierre Albert-Birot

68. “She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her.I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching. My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.” - Gillian Flynn

69. “After all I've done for you' has alienated more children from their parents than any act of parent cruelty.” - Dorothy Rowe

70. “Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.” - Roman Payne

71. “We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.” - Justin Torres

72. “It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.” - Francesca Lia Block

73. “Natalie was buried in the family plot, next to a gravestone that already bore her parents' names. I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it's the only way to truly keep your child. Kid grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.” - Gillian Flynn

74. “The heart of a man is a small thing but it desires great matters. It is not big enough for a dog’s dinner but the whole world is not big enough for it. Man spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing. From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound; from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child.(...)And who will exterminate him who exterminates all others?” - Paul Hoffman

75. “The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.” - Criss Jami

76. “WHAT am I, after all, but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over; I stand apart to hear—it never tires me. To you, your name also; Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?” - Walt Whitman

77. “But sometimes I wanted to feel like a child, to know that he would stand in front of me while waves crashed towards us or arrows come at us.” - Belinda Jeffrey

78. “Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

79. “She was eight years old, with the body of a child, but her spirit was weighed down by an adult suffering.” - Somaly Mam

80. “Acceptance is to love and embrace everything that we find within ourselves like a mother embraces her child.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

81. “It was a child's awareness, never spoken or even fully acknowledged, but deeply felt.” - Donna Woolfolk Cross

82. “You see, there was this man, and he was a good man; he worked hard and did everything to the best of his ability. All he desired was for the most beautiful woman in the kingdom to be his wife. Now this wasn't all bad because she actually loved him too--very much so--but this vizier, he wanted her as well and not for so noble a cause as love.""What did he want her for?"Yashar paused for a moment. "So that people could look at him and say, 'He must be a great man to have such a beautiful wife.'""Oh. I thought he wanted her for sex," said Colby, disappointed.” - C. Robert Cargill

83. “You need to be proud of the fact that you survived everything you went through as a child. Don't seperate yourself from that life. Embrace it, because I'm so fucking proud of you.” - Colleen Hoover

84. “I couldn’t imagine leaving a child. Not because it was unthinkable, but because I couldn’t imagine having a child to leave.” - V.T. Davy

85. “And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.” - Vladimir Nabokov

86. “Woman, the child of so many tears shall never perish.” - St. Ambrose

87. “Sentiment has never been unpopular except with a few sick persons who are made sicker by the sight of a child, a glimpse of a wedding, or the thought of a happy home.” - Oscar Hammerstein II

88. “HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.” - Sheri S. Tepper