Childhood Quotes

“Adult males are what their moms designed them.”

“Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.”

“What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.”

“Infancy conforms to nobody;all conform to it.”

“How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home.”

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.”

“The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.”

“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”

“In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.”

“It was at "Little Lodge" I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as 'the Governess' was announced.”

“When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.”

“My mother made a brilliant impression upon my childhood life. She shone for me like the evening star.”

“I was on the whole considerably discouraged by my school days... It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.”

“...an old man is twice a child.”

“Children are all foreigners.”

“I lived a dream life (almost too exclusively, perhaps) when I was a lad and even now my thought goes back for refreshment to thosedays when all the world seemed to be a place of heroic adventure in which one's heart must keep its own counsel.”

“I didn't know much about golf growing up.”

“My mother always seemed to me like a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power. She shone for me like the evening star. I loved her dearly.”

“The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.”

“My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.”

“Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.”

“I see a schoolboy when I think of him,With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.”

“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years.”

“I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.”

“Give to these children, new from the world,Rest far from men.Is anything better, anything better?Tell us it then.”