Childhood Quotes

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”

“All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.”

“My mother says that my father truly enjoyed having a son. My two-years-younger twin sisters felt that he didn't quite know how to enjoy them. But I wasn't aware of those things then. So many of my childhood memories involve him. All the excursions into science were shaped by his knowledge and enthusiasm.”

“I was actually born in New York, and spent some of my childhood in Boston. But my family moved to San Diego when I was 12, and I went to high school here.”

“Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me.”

“I've been a musician since my childhood.”

“My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.”

“Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.”

“Those less fortunate eat dried fish while the truly destitute fight with the spiny shells of crabs or lobsters. Decades later, my father will find it incomprehensible that Americans crave what in his childhood was considered repugnant fare.”

“My childhood dream was to be prime minister.”

“If your child is constantly interrupting or doing other things to get your attention, he is not getting enough communication of the right kind. Just the fact that you are in the house with him all day does not mean that you are necessarily devoting any time to com- munication of his choice.”

“Towards the end of the Second World War, when I was sixteen years old, I was taken out of school and forced into the army. After a brief period of training at a base in Wüzburg, I arrived at the front, which by that time had already crossed the Rhine into Germany. There were well over a hundred in my company, all of whom were very young. One evening the company commander sent me with a message to battalion headquarters. I wandered all night long through destroyed, burning villages and farms, and when in the morning I returned to my company I found only the dead, nothing but dead, overrun by a combined bomber and tank assault. I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day, and behind this memory all my childhood dreams crumble away.”

“I love dancing, which I've been learning since childhood.”

“I meditated on my childhood, vague and distant before high school, where Laura still flickered only on the edge of things.”

“It really was hand-to-mouth and you can say, 'Poor little me, how dreadful, what a deprived childhood', but I didn't feel that way at all. It's all about the attitude at home.”

“I feel really lucky because I discovered acting when I was really young, I was like nine and I think I had a really happy childhood and youth. I was doing what I wanted.”

“I basically wanted to use the experiences I've gone through, the struggles of my childhood and kind of use the character that I was trying to create as an outlet to express the darker feelings that I was feeling. The more sad emotions that I was feeling.”

“My father was hard to know and gave little indication that there was much to know. He claimed he remembered almost nothing about his childhood.”

“That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.”

“I had a somewhat frenetic childhood because my mum and dad split up when I was five, and then my mum remarried.”