The `Why?' cannot, and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child's mind is a sealed book, and who see no divinity in a child's smile, would read such words in vain: while for any one that has ever loved one true child, no words are needed. For he will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from GOD's hands, on whom no shadow of sin, and but the outermost fringe of the shadow of sorrow, has yet fallen: he will have felt the bitter contrast between the haunting selfishness that spoils his best deeds and the life that is but an overflowing love--for I think a child's first attitude to the world is a simple love for all living things: and he will have learned that the best work a man can do is when he works for love's sake only, with no thought of name, or gain, or earthly reward. No deed of ours, I suppose, on this side the grave, is really unselfish: yet if one can put forth all one's powers in a task where nothing of reward is hoped for but a little child's whispered thanks, and the airy touch of a little child's pure lips, one seems to come somewhere near to this.

Every day as I wave to my children when I drop them off at school, or let one of them have a new experience — like crossing the street without holding my hand — I experience the struggle between love and non-attachment. It is hard to bear — the extreme love of one’s child and the thought that ultimately the child belongs to the world. There is this horrible design flaw — children are supposed to grow up and away from you; and one of you will die first.

We often hear all this rhetoric of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” discipline and punishment, and I just don’t believe in that. In all my years I haven’t come across an adult who, because they got an excess of love as a child, grew up to be a not-so-nice person. In fact, I believe exactly the opposite is true. And this isn’t rocket science, but I think that parents for understandable reasons sometimes forget that…

Children might or might not be a blessing, but to create them and then fail them was surely damnation.

Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross.

It is difficult to love someone who loves you, but easy to hate someone who loves you, and love someone who hates you.

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

It is an amazing thing,” my father once told me after Christophe was born, “how much a child loves a parent. That kind of love terrifies me.

Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.

Childhood is a tricky business. Usually something goes wrong.