Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
(Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), U.S. poet. Quoted in The Reader's Digest (Pleasantville, New York, February, 1978).)
We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. "Illusions," The Conduct of Life (1860).)
I shall lend credit to nothing against my people which parents would not believe against their own children.
(Elizabeth I (1533-1603), British Monarch, Queen of England (1558-1603). As quoted in The Sayings of Queen Elizabeth, ch. 2, by Frederick Chamberlin (1923).
Said in the late 1500s.)
One spares old people just as one spares children.
(Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist. Wilhelm Meister's Travels, Reflections in the Spirit of the Travellers (1829).)
Having advanced to the limit of boldness, child, you have stumbled against the lofty pedestal of Justice.
(Sophocles (497-406/5 B.C.), Greek tragedian. Antigone, l. 853.)
They say an old man is twice a child.
(William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Rosencrantz, in Hamlet, act 2, sc. 2, l. 385.
To Hamlet, who has just pointed out Polonius; proverbial.)
Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Nature, ch. 4 (1836, revised and repr. 1849).)
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
(Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), British occultist. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, ch. 49 (1929, revised 1970).)
Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
(Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist. Trans. by Lorenzo O'Rourke. "Thoughts," Postscriptum de ma vie, in Victor Hugo's Intellectual Autobiography, Funk and Wagnalls (1907).)
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
(John Ruskin (1819-1900), British writer.)