The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day. [ Milton ]

The childhood of immortality. [ Goethe ]

I remember, I remember
How my childhood fleeted by, -
The mirth of its December,
And the warmth of its July. [ Praed ]

The child is father of the man. [ Wordsworth ]

Standing with reluctant feet,
Where the brook and river meet,
Womanhood and childhood fleet! [ Longfellow ]

A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages. [ Thomas Campbell ]

Childhood is the sleep of reason. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death? [ Wordsworth ]

Heaven lies about us in our infancy. [ Wordsworth ]

Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born? [ Andrew Marvell ]

The heart of childhood is all mirth. [ Keble ]

A child is an angel dependent on man. [ Count de Maistre ]

Children are the tomorrow of society. [ Whately ]

Childhood, whose very happiness is love. [ L. E. L. Erinna ]

In bringing up a child, think of its old age. [ Joubert ]

But still I dream that somewhere there must be
The spirit of a child that waits for me. [ Bayard Taylor ]

Children have more need of models than of critics. [ Joseph Joubert ]

As each one wishes his children to be so they are. [ Terence ]

Children are the keys of Paradise;
They alone are good and wise,
Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer. [ R. H. Stoddard ]

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood. [ Proverb ]

Childhood may do without a grand purpose, but manhood cannot. [ J. G. Holland ]

The dutifulness of children is the foundation of all virtues. [ Cicero ]

Every child walks into existence through the golden gate of love. [ Beecher ]

Thine are the hours and days when both are cheering and innocent. [ Byron ]

Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children. [ R. H. Dana ]

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

The tear down childhood's cheek that flows is like the dew-drop on the rose. [ Sir Walter Scott ]

As I approach a second childhood, I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it. [ Lady Montagu ]

Let nothing foul to either eye or ear reach those doors within which dwells a boy. [ Juvenal ]

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in manhood just, and in old age prudent. [ Socrates ]

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. [ Coleridge ]

Parents deserve reproof when they refuse to benefit their children by severe discipline. [ Petronius Arbiter ]

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow. [ George Eliot ]

The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe. [ Wm. Mountford ]

The training of children is a profession where we must know to lose time in order to gain it. [ Rousseau ]

It is better to keep children to their duty by a sense of honor and by kindness than by fear. [ Terence ]

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us. [ Dickens ]

Children have neither past nor future; and that which seldom happens to us, they rejoice in the present. [ La Bruyere ]

Death is a silent, peaceful genius, who rocks our second childhood to sleep in the cradle of the coffin. [ Chatfield ]

To a mother, a child is everything; but to a child, a parent is only a link in the chain of her existence. [ Lord Beaconsfield ]

Study is the bane of childhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and the restoration of age. [ Walter Savage Landor ]

Many have gone in quest of light and fallen into deeper darkness; whereas childhood walks on secure in the twilight. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues. [ George Eliot ]

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity, is to continue in a state of childhood all our days. [ Plutarch ]

We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions. [ Goethe ]

Happy child! the cradle is still to thee a vast space; but when thou art a man the boundless world will be too small for thee. [ Schiller ]

No school is more necessary to children than patience, because either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age. [ Richter ]

Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter; they increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death. [ Bacon ]

I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them. [ Mme. Swetchine ]

A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, - by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]

Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature. [ Sears ]

To him who has thought, or done, or suffered much, the level days of his childhood seem at an immeasurable distance, far off as the age of chivalry, or as the line of Sesostris. [ Talfourd ]

And now he shook away the snow of time from the winter-green of memory, and beheld the fair years of his childhood uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. [ Richter ]

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years. To hear them talk one would imagine they were in their first childhood. As far as civilization goes they are in their second. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers, that now and then, from the influence of mood or circumstances, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love. [ H. T. Tuckerman ]

It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired places some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon. [ Lowell ]

Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression. [ J. Beaumont ]

Often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us, as village children, a grove of pleasure, has in after years of manhood, and in the town, given us by its old perfume, an indescribable transport back into godlike childhood; and how, like a flower goddess, it has raised us into the first embracing Aurora clouds of our first dim feelings! [ Richter ]

Who is there who has not experienced that often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us as village children a grove of pleasure, has in after years of manhood, and in the town, given us. by its old perfume an indescribable transport back into godlike childhood; and how, like a flower-goddess, it has raised us into the first embracing Aurora-clouds of our first dim feelings? [ Richter ]

The mother begins her process of training with the infant in her arms. It is she who directs, so to speak, its first mental and spiritual pulsations; she conducts it along the impressible years of childhood and youth, and hopes to deliver it to the rough contests and tumultuous scenes of life, armed by those good principles which her child has received from maternal care and love. [ D. Webster ]

Never! never has one forgotten his pure, right educated mother. On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, toward which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers, who marked out to us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O women! to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death! Be, then, the mothers of your children. [ Richter ]

Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood. [ Rogers ]

The love of a mother is never exhausted; it never changes, it never tires. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; she still remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of Iris childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy. [ W. Irving ]