Children Have Talent Quotes & Sayings

Dweck encourages parents and teachers to praise children for their effort, rather than their intelligence, talent, or looks. — Megan McArdle

Sometimes I think that I stay young and in touch with contemporary culture because of my children's interests. I'm so lucky to be surrounded by their talent and vibrancy. — Polixeni Papapetrou

Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you. — David Benioff

Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which can be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited. — Shinichi Suzuki

Something you consider bad may bring out your child's talents; something you consider good may stifle them. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Me, I don't want any children, I don't want responsibility. I am gay, I smoke weed and I do exactly what I want in my life because of my talent. I represent an ideal which others have had to let go and they blame me for that. Especially men. — George Michael

I couldn't add my talent, which is prodigious, to a defense of someone even accused of hurting a child. — Lynne Stewart

Almost without exception, they are men who dreamed of athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent. — Thomas Boswell

You have this thing you call . . . boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song - it went "Twinkle twinkle little star. . . ." What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming! Completely — Terry Pratchett

I never witness a performance of child-acrobats, or the exhibition of any forced talent, physical or mental, on the part of children, without protesting, at least in my own mind, against the blindness and cruelty of their parents or guardians or whoever has care of them. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage — James Weldon Johnson

It's useful to know how much society's holding you back. My mother would talk about how she was told by the head of her art school that she was the best painter, but that she wouldn't get the biggest prize because she would waste her talent by having children. I think we have to get honest with girls about how they can expect the world to block them, and we have to prepare girls, and ourselves, to break through those blocks. — Erica Jong

I loved being a child. If I do have a talent, it's not so much being an artist, but it's being able to remember back to that time. — Jan Brett

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. — Maya Angelou

His whole life he tried to make things better for poor children, but his real calling was being a father. It was a talent with him. As soon as our girls could sit up, he was wheeling them to the library and taking out books to read them bedtime stories. — Anita Diamant

My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms. — Masiela Lusha

Each of us should take personal responsibility for our diet, and our children's diet, and the government's role should be to make certain it provides the best information possible to help people stay healthy. — Jim Talent

Children can create fun out of nothing and when this great talent is lost you become a boring creature which is called adult! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Children have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with the kind of respect we are so confident it ought to be given. To the irritation of authority figures of all sorts, children expend considerable energy in "clowning around." They refuse to appreciate the gravity of our monumental concerns, while we forget that if we were to become more like children our concerns might not be so monumental. — Conrad Hyers

I believe every child is born with a gift from God - big or small - and that we should all make the most of our talents. — Gretchen Carlson

If you could start children right from the beginning with this thought, you'd see the effect it has on their lives. In fact, I did this with my own children. Again and again, I told them there was a reason why they were here, and they had to find out what that reason was for themselves. From the age of four years, they heard this. I also taught them to meditate when they were about the same age, and I told them, "I never, ever want you to worry about making a living. If you're unable to make a living when you grow up, I'll provide for you, so don't worry about that. I don't want you to focus on doing well in school. I don't want you to focus on getting the best grades or going to the best colleges. What I really want you to focus on is asking yourself how you can serve humanity, and asking yourself what your unique talents are. Because you have a unique talent that no one else has, and you have a special way of expressing that talent, and no one else has it. — Deepak Chopra

I hate all children of precocious talent. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Mr. Gibbons had the talent that many puppeteers have of speaking to children as though he believed they were intelligent and could understand a thing or two. — Jesse Ball

It doesn't make any difference how much money a father earns, his name is always Dad-Can-I ... Like all other children, my five have one great talent: they are gifted beggars. Not one of them ever ran into the room, looked up at me, and said, I'm really happy that you're my father, and as a tangible token of my appreciation, here's a dollar. — Bill Cosby

For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game. — J.G. Ballard

Sometimes it's good to be the smartest rat in the sewer. — Michael Houbrick

If you tell an eight-year-old she has a talent for something, she'll never give it a rest. — Lauren Leto

Because when a teacher appreciates you, you think "I am something!" In a society where people believe girls are weak, and not capable of anything except cooking and cleaning, you think "I have a talent." When a teacher tells you that all great leaders and scientists were once children, too, you think, "Maybe we can be the great ones tomorrow." In a country where so many people consider it a waste to send girls to school, it is a teacher who helps you believe in your dreams. — Malala Yousafzai

All around the world, we send our top talent into finance, technology, medicine and law - everywhere but towards expanding opportunity for our most marginalized children. — Wendy Kopp

After seven experiments with hundreds of children, we had some of the clearest findings I've ever seen: Praising children's intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance. How can that be? Don't children love to be praised? Yes, children love praise. And they especially love to be praised for their intelligence and talent. It really does give them a boost, a special glow - but only for the moment. The minute they hit a snag, their confidence goes out the window and their motivation hits rock bottom. If success means they're smart, then failure means they're dumb. That's the fixed mindset. — Carol S. Dweck

A book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an imperfect image,
the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual, Venus,
whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons,
breathes, the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever. — Robert Aris Willmott

Children's lies are signs of great talent. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What is the purpose of my writing about the various experiences of my life? It is not for publicity, but with the hope that the reader, especially my descendants, may plan a career to which they are naturally best adapted. Most children are born with a gift or talent which can be noticed in early childhood and should be encouraged and directed in the right way. Solomon said, 'Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.' Train does not mean compel, or to compare him with other children, but to encourage him in that for which he has a natural tendency. The boy who will become proficient in a lawful trade or profession, other things being favorable, will be a value to society and remunerative to himself and others. — Ernest Albert Law

Real ability is the child of God-given talent and rock solid diligence. Nobody maintains ability without hard work. Nobody. — Cung Le

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. — Michael Kaplan

She looked as if she were in the middle of posing for an unbelievably glamorous photo shoot. Then again, she always did. It was her talent. Clary, however, was staring stubbornly up into Isabelle's face and talking to her. Simon thought Clary would get her way and get Isabelle to pay attention to her eventually. That was her talent. — Cassandra Clare

Making a child feel unique means making him or her feel uniquely wanted. Having a talent is one thing; feeling that the universe welcomes it is another. Uniqueness without love is barren and very little different from loneliness. Today you can sit down and list each child's talents, having your children participate, in order to reinforce the notion that talents are given to us by spirit for our happiness and fulfillment. — Deepak Chopra

A talent for building children's souls, Hilde. So building their souls that they might grow straight and fine, nobly and beautifully formed, to their full human stature. That was where Aline's talent lay. — Henrik Ibsen

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself - but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses - how many of them he had seen put on their "wooden jackets." Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons - but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers. — Vasily Grossman

I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults. — Lynne Reid Banks

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them. — Rita Dove

I have a real passion for children. I always wanted to teach and only became an athlete because my parents told my brother Parenthesis and me that we should use any God-given talent we had. — Gail Devers

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have never been a child prodigy. When I think back to my childhood, I can not discern any sign of future success. My only real talent couldn't be found in any curriculum: whistling. — Bobbejaan Schoepen

I heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity. It may even have a greater role than believed in the least understood human talent: creativity, that is, artistic creation and scientific discovery. — Kato Lomb

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous. — Steven Pressfield

Materialistic success can be explained quite simply. Those who succeed focus their attention on success - not on their talent. Remember these words! All of their efforts are focused toward the upward movement rather than the perfection of their artistic ability. Neither do they allow anyone to anything to stand in the way of reaching their goals. This includes wives, families, friends and their children. They are prepared to pay the very high price that success demands. — Brad Steiger

Every articulate family ... generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child. — Elizabeth Fishel

I've written about the giving of trust as though it were a simple formula for building loyalty. But it isn't simple at all. The talent that is an essential ingredient of leadership tells the leader whom to trust and how much to trust and when to trust. The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn't make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you're risk-averse, you won't do it. And that's a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure. — Tom DeMarco

One thing that all of my children, biological and foster children, have taught me is the unbelievable diversity of talent and giftedness that all people have. — Michele Bachmann

To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Among all the emotions, the rich have the least talent for love. It is possible to love one's dog, dress or duck-shooting hat, but a human being presents a more difficult problem. The rich might wish to experience feelings of affection, but it is almost impossible to chip away the enamel of their narcissism. They take up all the space in all the mirrors in the house. Their children, who represent the most present and therefore the most annoying claim on their attention, usually receive the brunt of their irritation. — Lewis H. Lapham

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman. — Margaret Halsey

Gods are boring creatures, Bet. Most are nosthing more than spoiled children with powers they never hesitate to use against those weaker. And while your father can be juvenile at times, there is a danger to him. He understands his power ans he's fierce with it. More than that, he doesn't prey on those weaker, he only attacks those who are stronger/ That was what dreq me to him and why i agreed tp be the mother of his daugher. His strength, and the fact that he never once did he use it against me. Your father is like having a lion for a pet. You know that it's a creature of utter and supreme violence whose mere nature and talent is murder, and yet it lies down at your side and purrs for your touch alone. There is nothing more titillating.
But more than that was hpw you father made me feel. He awoke something inside me that had never lived before. He breathed life into my soul and I was a better person for having known him — Sherrilyn Kenyon

One of the biggest gifts you can give a child is confidence, because confidence will take you miles - more than talent, more than anything else. So yes, I want my children to have confidence and to be kind. — Rafe Spall

I've been collecting since college, .. When we're children, we're taught to draw in the lines, use certain colors. In this art, the talent and the creativity we had as children hasn't been squashed. The early stuff is still there. — Beverly L. Kaye

Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? Yes. You do. You call it 'opening your eyes again.' But you do it for a moment. We have done it for eternity. No sleep, no rest, just endless ... endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call ... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song - it went 'Twinkle twinkle little star ... ' What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming! — Terry Pratchett