92 Child-Inspired Quotes

Children possess a unique perspective on life that often brings out the purest, most genuine wisdom. Their unfiltered view of the world can teach us invaluable lessons about curiosity, creativity, and the simple joys of living. As we navigate the complexities of adulthood, it's refreshing to pause and revisit the innocence and brilliance encapsulated in their words. In this post, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 92 child-inspired quotes, each one offering a delightful reminder of the magic and wonder that children see in everyday moments. Join us as we explore these heartwarming and inspirational thoughts that can inspire us all to see life through a child's eyes.

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

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

3. “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

4. “Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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. “Reading to small children is a specialty.” - Clifton Fadiman

7. “I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.” - Alberto Manguel

8. “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

9. “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

10. “I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...” - Clive Barker

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Don't stand unmoving outside the door of a crying baby whose only desire is to touch you. Go to your baby. Go to your baby a million times. Demonstrate that people can be trusted, that the environment can be trusted, that we live in a benign universe.” - Peggy O'Mara

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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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. “Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.” - Chuck Palahniuk

21. “No time is more precious and well rewarded than those few moments you spend reading a story to a child” - Robert D. Harris

22. “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

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

24. “Hello, inner child, I'm the inner babysitter!” - Terry Pratchett

25. “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

26. “I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.” - Paulo Coelho

27. “The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.” - John Irving

28. “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

29. “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

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

31. “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

32. “Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.” - Stephen M. Irwin

33. “I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.” - Anne Lamott

34. “Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” - Richard Dawkins

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

36. “Sometimes she would cry. I was so lonely, she'd say. You have no idea how lonely I was. And I had friends, I was a lucky one, but I was lonely anyway.I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said her to once.I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.” - Margaret Atwood

37. “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

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

39. “Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the kingship is a child's.” - Heraclitus

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

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

42. “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

43. “All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth")” - Davis Grubb

44. “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

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

46. “I can see that an insufficent, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to languauge” - Preston and Child

47. “By loving them for more than their abilities we show our children that they are much more than the sum of their accomplishments.” - Eileen Kennedy-Moore

48. “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

49. “One of the things that Christmas reminds us is that Jesus Christ was once a child.” - Hark Herald Sarmiento

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

51. “Lena felt like a child. Worse than a child and less valuable. She felt like a mouse. No, smaller than a mouse and less alive. Her life seemed so small and crumpled you could shoot it through a straw like a spitball.” - Ann Brashares

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

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

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

55. “I am the child of a lunatic. Not a child of God.” - Chuck Palahniuk

56. “My darling, you are indisposed! You must remain abed for the next eight months. Little Buford - ""I am NOT naming our child Buford...” - Cassandra Clare

57. “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

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

59. “When I was kidnapped as a child my parents sent a letter to the hijackers me Pay 5,000 dollars or your back” - Rodney Dangerfield

60. “And even though I adore the fact that Francesca has Ben's eyes, I also see now that her biological connection to us is irrelevant. She is her own little person. She is Francesca. If we weren't her "natural" parents, we would still have loved her just as much.” - Liane Moriarty

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “To simplify your life, just think of yourself as a four-year-old child. Try to imagine the way he thinks of reality. If you have to talk to someone about a so-called complicated matter, see how you can simplify it.No matter with whom you are talking, feel that you are a child and that person is also a child. When a childlike quality comes into your life, everything automatically becomes simple.” - Sri Chinmoy

67. “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

68. “This is my life's work. It is a user's manual to the human being, a parenting book ... and how to be the best you can be.” - Faye Snyder

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

70. “I love you, Daisy. I love you so much I hurt.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

75. “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

76. “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

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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Motherhood doesn't have a nationality” - Melinda Cross

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

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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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