A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful and wit good-natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty and affliction, convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable.—Addison.
Children.—If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession.—T.W. Higginson.
I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.—Dickens.
They are idols of hearts and of households;
They are angels of God in disguise;
His sunlight still sleeps in their tresses;
His glory still gleams in their eyes.
Oh those truants from home and from heaven,
They have made me more manly and mild,
And I know now how Jesus could liken
The kingdom of God to a child.
—Dickens.
The child is father of the man.
—Wordsworth.
The smallest children are nearest to God, as the smallest planets are nearest the sun.—Richter.
In trying to teach children a great deal in a short time, they are treated not as though the race they were to run was for life, but simply a three-mile heat.—Horace Mann.
Childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
—Milton.
Be very vigilant over thy child in the April of his understanding, lest the frost of May nip his blossoms. While he is a tender twig, straighten him; whilst he is a new vessel, season him; such as thou makest him, such commonly shalt thou find him. Let his first lesson be obedience, and his second shall be what thou wilt.—Quarles.
A child is an angel dependent on man.—Count de Maistre.