Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

Peter, you're twelve years old. I'm ten. They have a word for people our age. They call us children and they treat us like mice.

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.

Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child

Adults are always telling young people, 'These are the best years of your life.' Are they? I don't know. Sometimes when adults say this to children I look into their faces. They look like someone on the top seat of the Ferris wheel who has had too much cotton candy and barbecue. They'd like to get off and be sick but everyone keeps telling them what a good time they're having.

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

Philosophy has forgotten about children

I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but there was no one to ask. Besides I knew that people only told lies to children-lies about everything from soup to Santa Claus.

Children, as persons, are entitled to the greatest respect. Children are given to us as free-flying souls, but then we clip their wings like we domesticate the wild mallard. Children should become the role-models for us, their parents, for they are coated with the spirit from which they came- out of the ether, clean, innocent, brimming with the delight of life, aware of the beauty of the simplest thing; a snail, a bud.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not- even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian- it's only a matter of time.

Children notice things first, people later.

We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child's spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.

...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

People like to make children into little grown-ups.

Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.

Every child’s life is sacred and it is long past time that we protect it.

Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.

Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.