Infant

An infant (from the Latin word infans, meaning "unable to walk" or "speechless") is the more formal or specialised synonym for "baby", the very young offspring of a human. The term may also be used to refer to juveniles of other organisms.

Quotes

Though she be but little, she is fierce. ~ William Shakespeare

A-K

Babies are the enemies of the human race. . . . Let's consider it this way: by the time the world doubles its population, the amount of energy we will be using will be increased sevenfold which means probably the amount of pollution that we are producing will also be increased sevenfold. If we are now threatened by pollution at the present rate, how will we be threatened with sevenfold pollution by, say, 2010 A.D., distributed among twice the population? We'll be having to grow twice the food out of soil that is being poisoned at seven times the rate.
- Isaac Asimov On Overpopulation, quoted in Isaac Asimov (Writers of the 21st Century), (1977), Joseph D. Olander (Author, Editor), Martin Harry Greenberg (Editor) Taplinger Pub. Co. ISBN 080084257X ISBN 9780800842574 p. 165. [1]

BABE or BABY, n. A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion. There have been famous babes; for example, little Moses, from whose adventure in the bulrushes the Egyptian hierophants of seven centuries before doubtless derived their idle tale of the child Osiris being preserved on a floating lotus leaf.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

How lovely he appears! his little cheeks
In their pure incarnation, vying with
The rose leaves strewn beneath them.
And his lips, too,
How beautifully parted! No; you shall not
Kiss him; at least not now; he will wake soon—
His hour of midday rest is nearly over.
- Lord Byron, Cain (1821), Act III, scene 1, line 14.

He smiles, and sleeps!—sleep on
And smile, thou little, young inheritor
Of a world scarce less young: sleep on and smile!
Thine are the hours and days when both are cheering
And innocent!
- Lord Byron, Cain (1821), Act III, scene 1, line 24.

Look! how he laughs and stretches out his arms,
And opens wide his blue eyes upon thine,
To hail his father; while his little form
Flutters as winged with joy. Talk not of pain!
The childless cherubs well might envy thee
The pleasures of a parent.
- Lord Byron, Cain (1821), Act III, scene 1, line 171.

And though she be but little, she is fierce.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596), spoken by Helena in act 3, scene 2, referring to her friend Hermia.

A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy.
- William Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1591), Act IV, scene 4, line 167.

God mark thee to his grace!
Thou wast the prettiest babe that e'er I nursed:
An I might live to see thee married once,
I have my wish.
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act I, scene 3, line 59.

Fie, fie, how wayward is this foolish love
That, like a testy babe, will scratch the nurse
And presently all humbled kiss the rod!
- William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1590s), Act I, scene 2, line 57.

A daughter and a goodly babe,
Lusty and like to live: the queen receives
Much comfort in 't.
- William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), Act II, scene 2, line 27.

In any election, only a percentage of the people vote. Those who can't vote because of age or other disqualifications, and those who don't vote because of confusion, apathy, or disgust at a Tweedledum-Tweedledummer choice can hardly be said to have any voice in the passage of the laws which govern them. Nor can the individuals as yet unborn, who will be ruled by those laws in the future.
- Linda & Morris Tannehill, Ch. 4, "Government—An Unnecessary Evil", The Market for Liberty (1970), pp. 33–34.

But what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
- Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), Part LIV, Stanza 5.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Have you not heard the poets tell
How came the dainty Baby Bell
Into this world of ours?

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 54-56.

Have you not heard the poets tell
How came the dainty Baby Bell
Into this world of ours?
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Baby Bell.

Oh those little, those little blue shoes!
Those shoes that no little feet use.
Oh, the price were high
That those shoes would buy,
Those little blue unused shoes!
- William C. Bennett, Baby's Shoes.

Lullaby, baby, upon the tree top;
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down comes the baby, and cradle and all.
- Said to be "first poem produced on American soil." Author a Pilgrim youth who came over on the Mayflower. See Book Lover, Feb., 1904.

Rock-bye-baby on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough bends the cradle will fall,
Down comes the baby, cradle and all.
- Old nursery rhyme, attributed in this form to Charles Dupee Blake.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
- William Blake, A Cradle Song.

There came to port last Sunday night
The queerest little craft,
Without an inch of rigging on;
I looked and looked—and laughed.
It seemed so curious that she
Should cross the unknown water,
And moor herself within my room—
My daughter! O my daughter!
- G. W. Cable, The New Arrival.

Lo! at the couch where infant beauty sleeps;
Her silent watch the mournful mother keeps;
She, while the lovely babe unconscious lies,
Smiles on her slumbering child with pensive eyes.
- Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope, Part I, line 225.

He is so little to be so large!
Why, a train of cars, or a whale-back barge
Couldn't carry the freight
Of the monstrous weight
Of all of his qualities, good and great.
And tho' one view is as good as another,
Don't take my word for it. Ask his mother!
- Edmund Vance Cooke, The Intruder.

"The hand that rocks the cradle"—but there is no such hand.
It is bad to rock the baby, they would have us understand;
So the cradle's but a relic of the former foolish days,
When mothers reared their children in unscientific ways;
When they jounced them and they bounced them, those poor dwarfs of long ago—
The Washingtons and Jeffersons and Adamses, you know.
- Ascribed to Bishop Doane, What Might Have Been. A complaint that for hygienic reasons, he was not allowed to play with his grandchild in the old-fashioned way.

When you fold your hands, Baby Louise!
Your hands like a fairy's, so tiny and fair,
With a pretty, innocent, saintlike air,
Are you trying to think of some angel-taught prayer
You learned above, Baby Louise.
- Margaret Eytinge, Baby Louise.

Baloo, baloo, my wee, wee thing.
- Richard Gall, Cradle Song.

The morning that my baby came
They found a baby swallow dead,
And saw a something hard to name
Fly mothlike over baby's bed.
- Ralph Hodgson, The Swallow.

What is the little one thinking about?
Very wonderful things, no doubt;
Unwritten history!
Unfathomed mystery!
Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks,
And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks,
As if his head were as full of kinks
And curious riddles as any sphinx!
- J. G. Holland, Bitter-Sweet, First Movement, line 6.

When the baby died,
On every side
Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud.
The baby was not wrapped in any shroud.
The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed
That men's eyes might not see
Her misery.
- Helen Hunt Jackson, When the Baby Died.

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience
- Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell (Smith, Grover (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus).

The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.

"Offer them the flowers and the books again."

The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.

"Observe," said the Director triumphantly, "observe."

- Aldous Huxley Brave New World Aldous Huxley Brave New World ch.2

Sweet is the infant's waking smile,
And sweet the old man's rest—
But middle age by no fond wile,
No soothing calm is blest.
- John Keble, Christian Year, Stanza Philip and St. James, Stanza 3.

L-Z

Suck, baby! suck! mother's love grows by giving:
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting!
Black manhood comes when riotous guilty living
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.
- Charles Lamb, The Gypsy's Malison. Sonnet in Letter to Mrs. Procter, Jan. 29, 1829.

The hair she means to have is gold,
Her eyes are blue, she's twelve weeks old,
Plump are her fists and pinky.
She fluttered down in lucky hour
From some blue deep in yon sky bower—
I call her "Little Dinky."
- Frederick Locker-Lampson, Little Dinky.

A tight little bundle of wailing and flannel,
Perplex'd with the newly found fardel of life.
- Frederick Locker-Lampson, The Old Cradle.

O child! O new-born denizen
Of life's great city! on thy head
The glory of the morn is shed,
Like a celestial benison!
Here at the portal thou dost stand,
And with thy little hand
Thou openest the mysterious gate
Into the future's undiscovered land.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, To a Child.

Why can't women just love having babies? Is it too laughable, parochial, bourgeois not to obsess over your career?
If there is one thing I wish had been different at my hard, driven, academic school, it's that no one, not a single teacher, said to me: "Look, by the way, there's this thing that might happen in the middle of your life and it's going to be amazing. Make space for it, because it’s going to be a lot, lot better than getting 87 per cent in Latin."
But no one ever did.
- "I love being a mother, but Stella Creasy is desperate to make it seem like a curse", The Sunday Times (16 December 2023)
- Stella Creasy is the Labour & Co-op MP for Walthamstow.

A baby was sleeping,
Its mother was weeping.
- Samuel Lover, Angel's Whisper.

Her beads while she numbered,
The baby still slumbered,
And smiled in her face, as she bended her knee;
Oh! bless'd be that warning,
My child, thy sleep adorning,
For I know that the angels are whispering with thee.
- Samuel Lover, Angel's Whisper.

He seemed a cherub who had lost his way
And wandered hither, so his stay
With us was short, and 'twas most meet,
That he should be no delver in earth's clod,
Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet
To stand before his God:
O blest word—Evermore!
- James Russell Lowell, Threnodia.

How did they all just come to be you?
God thought about me and so I grew.
- George MacDonald, Song in "At the Back of The North Wind." Chapter XXXIII.

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the Everywhere into here.
- George MacDonald, Song in "At the Back of The North Wind." Chapter XXXIII.

Whenever a little child is born
All night a soft wind rocks the corn;
One more buttercup wakes to the morn,
Somewhere, Somewhere.
One more rosebud shy will unfold,
One more grass blade push through the old,
One more bird-song the air will hold,
Somewhere, Somewhere.
- Agnes Carter Mason, Somewhere.

And thou hast stolen a jewel, Death!
Shall light thy dark up like a Star.
A Beacon kindling from afar
Our light of love and fainting faith.
- Gerald Massey, Babe Christabel.

You scarce could think so small a thing
Could leave a loss so large;
Her little light such shadow fling
From dawn to sunset's marge.
In other springs our life may be
In bannered bloom unfurled,
But never, never match our wee
White Rose of all the world.
- Gerald Massey, Our Wee White Rose.

A sweet, new blossom of Humanity,
Fresh fallen from God's own home to flower on earth.
- Gerald Massey, Wooed and Won.

Wee Willie Winkie rins through the toun,
Up stairs and doon stairs in his nicht-goun,
Tirlin' at the window, cryin' at the lock,
"Are the weans in their bed? for it's now ten o'clock."
- William Miller, Willie Winkie.

As living jewels dropped unstained from heaven.
- Robert Pollok, Course of Time, Book V, line 158.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.
- Psalms, VIII. 2.

Beneath the surface, the Giantess reader seems to be a man who longs for his infancy. He looks back fondly at the time he was dwarfed by his mother and scolded for soiling himself. And that's just about the last experience I care to reflect upon. Sure I received a few spankings but I never considered them a high point. I moved ahead and got on with my life. Didn't I?
- David Sedaris BArrel Fever: Stories and Essays

Sweetest li'l' feller, everybody knows;
Dunno what to call him, but he's mighty lak' a rose;
Lookin' at his mammy wid eyes so shiny blue
Mek' you think that Heav'n is comin' clost ter you.
- Frank L. Stanton, Mighty Lak' a Rose.

A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal,
Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
A little soul.
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Baby's Death.

Beat upon mine, little heart! beat, beat!
Beat upon mine! you are mine, my sweet!
All mine from your pretty blue eyes to your feet,
My sweet!
- Alfred Tennyson, Romney's Remorse.

Baby smiled, mother wailed,
Earthward while the sweetling sailed;
Mother smiled, baby wailed,
When to earth came Viola.
- Francis Thompson, The Making of Viola, Stanza 9.

A babe in a house is a well-spring of pleasure.
- Martin Farquhar Tupper, Of Education.

Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,
Holy angels guard thy bed!
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently falling on thy head.
- Isaac Watts, A Cradle Hymn.