Childhood Quotes

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

It is never too late to have a happy childhood

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along―the same person that I am today.

My ideal goal is to "mature" into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.

. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.

There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.

For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

I had a series of childhood illnesses... scarlet fever.... pneumonia.... Polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn't like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports.

I really am a pessimist. I've always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It's something essentially splendid because it's not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.

The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.

We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

This life is but the childhood of our immortality.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

...after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of childhood?

It was no great tragedy being Judy Garland's daughter. I had tremendously interesting childhood years - except they had little to do with being a child.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations."

The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.

Sometimes I wish I had a terrible childhood, so that at least I'd have an excuse.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my OWN childhood vividly; I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let the adults *know* I knew... it would scare them.

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

There's a strange sensation - you recall it from childhood - about sleeping in the afternoon. You rise into a different world from the one in which you lay down. The shadows have been rearranged. There's a sensation of sad sweetness, as if something has been overlooked. I used to feel it coming out of the movies just before dinnertime, after the matinee. How, I wondered, did Broadway actors face it, this bittersweet sense of time's slipping past.

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.

It's the continuation of everyone's childhood to see these young children who grow up full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder. And within an instant they're gone from this world. It's terrible.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

[A difficult childhood gave me] a kind of cocky confidence. ... I could never have so little that I hadn't had less. It took away my fear.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe, - Sailed on a river of crystal light Into a sea of dew.

Since childhood I'd been suspected of imagination

Somewhere in my wildest childhood I must have done something right. Being able to make a boyhood dream come true is one thing, but to have a kid come along and thrill his dad like Brett Hull has thrilled me over his career is too much for one guy to handle.

A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

From childhood's hour I have not beenAs others were; I have not seenAs others saw

One has to bear in mind that during my childhood and adolescence, I suffered the repression of the Somoza dictatorship in every way: economically, socially, as well as at the hands of the police — because if we went out on the street to play baseball, for example, the police would come and beat us up and put us in prison.

In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

The events of childhood do not pass but repeat themselves like seasons of the year.

Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

There are three terrible ages of childhood - 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.

The wildest colts make the best horses.

I don't have any great love for Chicago. What the hell, a childhood around Douglas Park isn't very memorable. I remember the street fights and how you were afraid to cross the bridge cause the Irish kid on the other side would beat your head in. I left Chicago a long time ago

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains."

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

We see these adolescents mourning for a lost childhood.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

The child is father of the man.

I think it reminds me of my childhood, my father, .. I think people have the same reaction. It reminds you of what it was like to be a kid, where everything is carefree and fun.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

Let us turn to our own childhoods-no further-if we will renew our sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

I think that saving a little child And bringing him to his own, Is a derned sight better business Than loafing around the throne.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

I believe there are few whose view of life has not been affected by the stern or kindly influences of their early childhood, which threw them in upon themselves in timidity and reserve, or drew them out in genial confidence and sympathy with their fellow creatures.

I felt if I went chronologically, I'd get bogged down in childhood and that's part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

I was coming home from kindergarten - well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

It is possible to resolve childhood repression safely and without confusion - something that has always been disputed by the most respected schools of thought.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Oh, high is the price of parenthood, and daughters may cost you double. You dare not forget, as you thought you could, that youth is a plague and a trouble.

Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.