Childhood Quotes: Timeless Memories and Nostalgic Wisdom

"A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost"

Marion C. Garretty, Poet

"A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of"

William Golding, Novelist

"If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older"

Tom Stoppard, Dramatist

"I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood"

Manuel Puig, Author

"Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood"

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Author

"I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy"

Tyler Perry, Actor

"From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else"

John Philip Sousa, Musician

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will"

Arthur Rimbaud, Poet

"I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid"

Patrick Stewart, Actor

"Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along"

Harry Stack Sullivan, Psychologist

"That said, let me add that Joan and I never want him to be a child actor. We both feel that it takes away their childhood and puts untold pressure on children"

Dwayne Hickman, Actor

"I'm aware of what kids like because I'm constantly in touch with them. Also, they say that a lot of people who write for children can remember their own childhoods vividly and I can remember my childhood very vividly"

Eric Wilson, Musician

"What can I say? I deal with it. I think I have come to terms with my absolutely hateful and vile childhood. No, I have, really. But I did hate it at the time. I resented it. There were elements of it that were positively Dickensian"

Richard Griffiths, Actor

"One's age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful. Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place. At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it; but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful"

Thomas Arnold, Educator

"I think childhood is to everyone a lost land"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness"

Henri Frederic Amiel, Philosopher

"Life is the childhood of our immortality"

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Writer

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!"

Charles Dickens, Novelist

"What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero"

Pablo Picasso, Artist

"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection"

Sigmund Freud, Psychologist

"Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood"

Gertrude Stein, Author

"My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children"

Bill Cosby, Comedian

"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, Philosopher

"I get stubborn and dig in when people tell me I can't do something and I think I can. It goes back to my childhood when I had problems in school because I have a learning disability"

Ann Bancroft, Explorer

"Childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it"

George Will, Journalist

"That great Cathedral space which was childhood"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"Childhood is the sleep of reason"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosopher

"My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night"

Lee Grant, Actress

"Genius is childhood recalled at will"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

"I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts"

Thornton Wilder, Writer

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood"

Agatha Christie, Writer

"Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic if it is pulled out I shall die"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age"

Margaret Mead, Scientist

"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind"

E. B. White, Writer

"My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college"

Philip Zimbardo, Psychologist

"Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age"

Walter Savage Landor, Poet

"Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change"

Alice Meynell, Poet

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