Childhood Past And Present Quotes

#1. There are those who seem to feel they have no choice about being jerks in the present because they had a crappy childhood. Well, that's the definition of childhood; nobody gets out alive. You either get stronger from what you experience, or you turn it into a crutch, an excuse, a dodge.

J. Michael Straczynski

#2. Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.

Jonathan Kozol

#3. I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most exalted performances of genius which I felt in childhood from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

Edmund Burke

#4. The greatest privilege of childhood is to live totally in the present.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#5. From childhood I was compelled to concentrate attention upon myself. This caused me much suffering, but to my present view, it was a blessing in disguise for it has taught me to appreciate the inestimable value of introspection in the preservation of life, as well as a means of achievement.

Nikola Tesla

#6. I'm just having fun. And giving a sort of second shot at childhood and life - and I need to be present to do it.

Sandra Bullock

#7. Think of the Christmas present
of gashes you opened when, in an attempt
to be Superman, you slid in stocking feet
on a slippery wood floor and crashed
half way through a window. Hopes
of heroism dashed on the heels
of no clear sighting of Santa.

Kristen Henderson

#8. Man to the last is but a froward child;
So eager for the future, come what may,
And to the present so insensible.

Samuel Rogers

#9. The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

Joan Didion

#10. The church of my own childhood, as well as that of my present and my future, comprises deeply flawed human beings struggling toward an unattainable ideal.

Philip Yancey

#11. It's never too late to change the programming imprinted in childhood, carried in our genes or derived from previous lives; the solution is mindfulness in the present moment.

Peter Shepherd

#12. In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.

Rebecca Solnit

#13. Magic is a cliche, but what do you call it when you enter a place and you can pretend you're anywhere and everywhere from the Mesozoic era to present day, provided you haven't killed every bit of childhood wonder with cynicism? It is magic. The kind that exists.

Wayne Gladstone

#14. I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.

Elizabeth McCracken

#15. Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present.

Tim Cope

#16. because my childhood became all about prediction, I learned to live in the future. I didn't feel things in the present because I wanted to be a moving target, gone to the future before any blow could really be felt.

Gavin De Becker

#17. When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

Herman Hesse

#18. I never thought of a future without you. That was the reason I always lived in the present, hoping I would find you someday.

Sapan Saxena

#19. We commonly see problems in adults that had been present since childhood but which take a toll on the heart over time.

Gary Webb

#20. Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties.
Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.

Gregory Maguire

#21. I had from childhood not only the experience of love and truth common to all family life, but the idea of them embodied in the person of Jesus, a picture always present to our imagination as well as our feelings.

Joyce Cary

#22. For godhood and the hope for mankind, and within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever-present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved.

M. Scott Peck

#23. As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#24. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

Sigmund Freud

#25. Some veil between childhood and the present is necessary. If the veil is withdrawn, the artistic imagination sickens and dies, the prophet looks in the mirror with a disillusioned and cynical sneer, the scientist goes fishing.

Margaret Mead

#26. My parents explained: "You can either have a big Christmas and birthday present or we'll go abroad." We'd say: "Let's go abroad!" We had a lovely childhood.

Nicki Chapman

#27. Children raised with love and compassion will be free to use their time as adults in meaningful and creative ways, rather than expressing their childhood hurts in ways that harm themselves or others. If adults have no need to deal with the past, they can live fully in the present.

Jan Hunt

#28. Whoever you are and wherever you come from, you grew into your present shape and form in the garden of your early childhood.

A.S.A Harrison

#29. Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we restore the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.

Nhat Hanh

#30. Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

Joseph Campbell

#31. We will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity, due entirely to the excessive speed at which civilization was advancing.

Albert Einstein

#32. spite of the tragedy in her childhood and the ever-present press of war, she had mostly considered herself happy. There was almost always something to take delight in, if you were trying.

Laini Taylor