“Children are a precious gift, but they belong to no one but themselves. They are only lent us a little while.”

Más preciosa es la libertad que la dádiva, porque se pierde.
Maxim 286
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

Address to Frontier Muslim Students Federation (18 June 1945)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 262.

Tales of Mother Goose, 1727, "Little Thumb"

This is actually from an essay "On Government No. I" that appeared in Franklin's paper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, on 1 April 1736. The author was John Webbe. He wrote about the privileges enjoyed under British rule,
:Thank God! we are in the full enjoyment of all these privileges. But can we be taught to prize them too much? or how can we prize them equal to their value, if we do not know their intrinsic worth, and that they are not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature?
Misattributed

"Me and Miss Mandible".
Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964)

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia April 2, 1987
1980s

Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
Context: Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it; and the greater power he ascribes to faith, the more he deprives himself of that power which God has given to him when He endowed him with the gift of reason. Reason is a particle of the Creator's divinity. When we use it with a spirit of humility and justice we are certain to please the Giver of that precious gift.

"To Juan at the Winter Solstice" from Poems 1938-1945 (1946)
Poems