Children quotes

“The Child is father of the Man.”

Adult character grows from earlier habits of perception, so childhood is presented as a formative source rather than a discarded stage.

Source note: Poem “My Heart Leaps Up.”

“Honour thy father and thy mother.”

Respect within family life is framed as an enduring obligation rather than something owed only when relationships are easy or convenient.

Source note: Exodus 20:12 in the King James Version; the commandment places honor for parents among core covenant duties.

“We've got Father and Mother, and each other.”

Beth answers material lack by naming the relationships the sisters still possess, turning family presence into a concrete reason for gratitude rather than denying hardship.

Source note: Little Women, Chapter I; Beth responds while the March sisters compare their poverty and disappointments at the beginning of the novel.

“They teach us quite as much as we teach them.”

Education is reciprocal: adults may guide children, but close attention to children also teaches adults patience, perspective, honesty, and better ways of understanding growth.

Source note: Little Men; the observation describes the mutual education taking place in the Plumfield household and school rather than a one-way transfer of knowledge.

“Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.”

Ruskin presents affection toward children as relational rather than one-way: care given to a child can be met with trust, warmth and generosity in return.

Source note: The Crown of Wild Olive, Lecture I, “Work,” Project Gutenberg #26716, printed page 41. Ruskin places the sentence inside a Victorian Christian discussion of what he calls the loving and generous character of “right childhood”; this collection preserves that historical moral framework rather than treating every surrounding prescription as modern child-development evidence.

“A taste for the beauties of nature should be very early cultivated.”

Attention to nature is treated as something that can be educated, giving children another source of pleasure beyond display, fashion, or social approval.

Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Wollstonecraft recommends cultivating appreciation of nature from childhood.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

The image captures the particular hurt of care being answered by ingratitude within a close family bond.

Source note: King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4.

“One of my favorite fancies is to look at my family as a small world.”

A household becomes a miniature society where different temperaments must learn cooperation, responsibility, affection, boundaries, and ways of living together despite their differences.

Source note: Little Men; the family-as-world image frames Plumfield as a community in which varied children practice the habits needed for wider social life.

“Best of all the harvest are the happy children in the home to-night.”

The household’s most valuable outcome is not material production but the children growing within it; family care is pictured as a harvest measured in human flourishing.

Source note: Little Men; the closing harvest imagery turns the children gathered at home into the household’s most important yield and source of gratitude.

“The little child had come to link him once more with the whole world.”

The child reverses Silas’s isolation by creating a relationship that reconnects him with ordinary human concern, neighborhood life, affection, and a future beyond his private hoard.

Source note: Silas Marner; Eliot describes the social and emotional change produced by Eppie after Silas had withdrawn from other people and organized life around his gold.

“If I can make a good man of this wild boy, it will be the best work of my life.”

Care for a difficult child is treated as meaningful work: the aim is not control for its own sake but helping character develop through patience, structure, and attachment.

Source note: Little Men; Jo reflects on the responsibility of guiding a difficult boy and measures success by the person he may become rather than by convenience.

“It is the duty of a parent to preserve a child from receiving wrong impressions.”

Early impressions can become durable habits of judgment, so parents carry responsibility for the examples, expectations, and environments surrounding a child.

Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, discussion of early education and moral discipline.

“There is a place all ready for thee, my son; sit down and dry thy wet feet at once.”

The welcome is practical before it is sentimental: belonging is communicated through a place at the table, warmth, care, and immediate attention to a child’s need.

Source note: Little Men; Jo welcomes the newly arrived boy into Plumfield with concrete hospitality, establishing home and care before asking him to prove himself.

“Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.”

Twain shrinks a grand biblical origin story to the ordinary misery of teething, using disproportion between subject and complaint as the comic mechanism.

Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter IV epigraph; a comic Calendar maxim rather than dialogue by a character in the chapter.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

Early guidance is treated as formative, emphasizing the long reach that habits and instruction can have across a life.

Source note: Proverbs 22:6, King James Version.

“Here was a lonely, sick boy who needed just what she loved to give, a home and motherly care.”

Care answers several needs at once: illness, loneliness, and lack of belonging are met not with abstraction but with a home, dependable attention, and maternal affection.

Source note: Little Men; the narration explains why Jo responds to the boy’s condition through inclusion and sustained home care rather than treating him as a temporary problem.

“Curiosity in children is but an appetite after knowledge; and therefore ought to be encouraged in them.”

Locke treats curiosity as a natural drive toward knowledge and argues that education should protect and guide it rather than shame sincere questions.

Source note: Some Thoughts Concerning Education, section 118, on encouraging children’s enquiries.

“There was love between him and the child that blent them into one, and there was love between the child and the world.”

Affection between caregiver and child becomes a bridge rather than a closed bond: loving the child also draws Silas outward toward the wider world she naturally engages.

Source note: Silas Marner; the narration emphasizes that Eppie’s attachment joins Silas not only to her but also to the social world from which he had retreated.

“A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn courtesy.”

Key argues that respectful treatment is itself part of teaching respectful conduct: adults model the courtesy they expect children to learn rather than relying only on commands.

Source note: The Century of the Child, Chapter III, “Education,” Francis Maro translation revised by the author, Project Gutenberg #57283, printed page 130. The sentence belongs to Key’s early-twentieth-century reform pedagogy; nearby prescriptions are historically situated and are not imported into this collection as current child-safety or clinical guidance.

“A hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.”

Recovery may arrive through relationship rather than argument: caring for another person can redirect attention from what was lost toward a future that again contains responsibility and hope.

Source note: Silas Marner; the image follows Eliot’s description of people being drawn away from destructive isolation, with a child’s hand representing the relationship that leads forward.