Quotes & Sayings About Childhood Influence

It is curious that this man who, even in my childhood, made such an impression upon me, who had such a crucial influence on the whole bent of my mind, and who perhaps has even cast his shadow over the whole of my future, still remains, even now, a complete enigma to me in many respects. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Mom was the greatest influence of my childhood. She wanted to save me from the vice, lust, and drinking that was all about me. — Ethel Waters

I mean that reading forms your opinions, your worldview, especially childhood reading, and anything that does that has an impact. So call them friends, call some stories enemies if you want, but don't deny their influence. — Katherine Reay

The childhood poverty of both my parents and their minimal education did much to influence me and my two younger brothers in our education and career choices. One brother became a dentist and the other, a professor of anthropology with a Ph.D. degree. — Ferid Murad

You don't know the things in your childhood that influence you. You can't possibly know them. People today try to analyze the early environment and the reasons for something that happened, but if you look at children of the same family
children who have identical parents, go to identical schools, have an almost identical upbringing, and yet who have totally different experiences and neuroses
you realize that what influences the children is not so much the obvious externals as their emotional experiences. Of course any psychiatrist knows that. — Louis Auchincloss

I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia - that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives - and fail to find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. — Sigmund Freud

Comedy was why I got into acting the first place. Peter Sellers was a huge influence on my wanting to act. I grew up with him and found him hysterical. The Pink Panther films were an inspiration, from my earliest childhood days, when I was watching them with my brother and my dad. — Sally Hawkins

Only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already. — Graham Greene

Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born.
Sleep Has His House describes in the night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day. — Anna Kavan

No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom of childhood, in short, FOR SHEER GRATUITOUS MISERY-PRODUCING POWER this influence stands alone. — Henry Drummond

I grew up with probably three different authors having a seminal influence on my childhood, Dr. Seuss being one and Maurice Sendak being another. That was my parents, who exposed me to their stories. That's how I was introduced to the whole idea of not just reading, but storytelling in general. — Christopher Meledandri

It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it. — Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape. — Simon Callow

Psychologists often discuss the difference between "temperament" and "personality." Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. Some say that temperament is the foundation, and personality is the building. — Susan Cain

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what it is in our minds already; as in a love affair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back. But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future. I suppose that is why books excited us so much. What do we ever get nowadays from reading to equal the excitement and the revelation in those first fourteen years? ... It is in those early years that I would look for the crisis, the moment when life took a new slant in its journey towards death. — Graham Greene

Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship. — Brian L. Weiss

There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers that now and then, from the influence of mood of circumstance, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

I knew there was never anyone to blame when people get into drugs. They're always responsible for their own behavior, and it's not the dealer, it's not the friend, it's not the bad influence, it's not the childhood. — Anthony Kiedis

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur. — George Santayana

I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence. — J.G. Ballard

All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently. — Heyward Bruce Ewart III

A love of reading is an acquired taste, not an instinctive preference. The habit of reading is formed in childhood; and a child's taste in reading is formed in the right direction or in the wrong one while he is under the influence of his parents; and they are directly responsible for the shaping and cultivating of that taste. — Henry Clay Trumbull

My personality has not once altered under outside influence." "Then I'm genuinely appalled, and your childhood nannies have my intense sympathy. You've got a bit of a nerve, don't you think, accusing other people of vanity? You make Mr. Darcy look like the poster child for low self-esteem. — Lucy Parker

I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it. — Per Petterson

And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit. — Allen Ginsberg

Implanting spiritual ideas in children is very important. Many people live their entire lives according to the concepts that are implanted in them in childhood. When children learn they will get the most attention and love through doing constructive things, they will tend to stop doing destructive things. Most important of all, remember that children learn through example. No matter what you say it is what you do that will have an influence on them. — Peace Pilgrim

The verbal patterns and the patterns of behavior we present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These aesthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible. — Esphyr Slobodkina

I simply stepped out of the way and maintained my courage and my position in the face of constant disagreement, voiced opinion and attack. I held true and I stood my ground. I maintained my convictions and my commitment to allowing them to live in the kingdom of childhood. I protected them from outside influence and allowed their imaginations to soar. I instilled a lifelong love of learning in them and I shared my passion for reading. I allowed them to choose what they wanted to study and I provided the resources for them to delve in, unguided and undisturbed for however long they needed to gather what they believed to be enough understanding to satisfy their own personal drive. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Temperament refers to inborn, biologically based behavioral and emotional patterns that are observable in infancy and early childhood; personality is the complex brew that emerges after cultural influence and personal experience are thrown into the mix. — Susan Cain

I felt the sensation of each of the directions I mentally and emotionally turned into amazed at all the possible directions you can take with different motives that come in like it can make you a different person - I've often thought of this since childhood of suppose instead of going up Columbus as I usually did I'd turn into Filbert would something happen that at the time is insignificant enough but would be like enough to influence my whole life in the end? - What's in store for me in the direction I don't take? — Jack Kerouac

It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him. Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears that the rod is for the slave's back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years. — Solomon Northup

It was such an idyllic time when I grew up in Hong Kong. It was a British colony and very much geared towards buying the best of Britain. My childhood does have a huge influence on how we design. There must be a little bit of that nostalgia - childhood is so special. — Marie-Chantal Claire

When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life. — O.R. Melling

The most important influence in my childhood was my father. — DeForest Kelley

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. — M. Scott Peck

Let there be a child, who should,
not be taught.
Let there be a child, who should,
be refrained from books.
Let him not hear,
don't preach him, dear.
Don't let him read the quotations,
on internet and make them his passion.
Don't tell him stories of successful,
and make them his anthem.
Allow him to grow unto what,
he is to know. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence. — Alison Bechdel