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People with bad consciences always
fear the
judgment of children.
Mary McCarthy |
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children
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The
world was not left to us by our parents;
it was lent to us by our children.
African
Proverb
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The
best compliment to children or
friends
is the feeling you
give them
that they have been set free
to make
their own
inquiries,
to come to
conclusions
that are right for them,
whether or
not they coincide with your own.
Alistair Cooke
I think that the ideals of youth are fine,
clear
and unencumbered; and that the real art of living
consists in keeping alive the conscience and
sense of
values we had when we were young.
Rockwell
Kent |
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Peter DeVries
Who of us is mature
enough for offspring before the offspring themselves
arrive?
The value of marriage is not that adults
produce children but that children produce adults.
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Children not only have to learn what
their parents
learned in school, but also have to learn how
to learn.
This has to be recognized as a new
problem which is only partly solved.
Margaret Mead
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Ogden
Nash |
Oh, what a tangled web
do parents weave
when they think that their children are
naive. |
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Youth is a wonderful thing.
What a crime to
waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw
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I advise the young to
tell themselves constantly
that most often it is up to
them alone.
Andre Gide |
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To become mature is to
recover that sense
of seriousness which one had as a
child at play. |
Friedrich
Nietzsche |
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I
love working with children and around children.
I love being with children when we go to a picnic
or a party because while the adults sit around and talk,
the children do. They find things, they
invent things, they're active. I can sit and talk
with another adult on a cold rainy day when it's not a
good idea (for health reasons) to get cold and wet, but on a
bright spring or summer or fall day, even a winter day, I want to be
alive--I want to feel my blood flow, I want to
feel my muscles being used. Kids do that naturally,
and when I'm with them, I can feel their energy, their
aliveness.
Being with children also gives me a
much healthier perspective. while there are of
course exceptions, most kids don't judge as harshly as
the adults tend to do--they want to know things, but they
don't need to judge, to put value on something; cynical
children come few and far between, but cynical adults are
a dollar a dozen (due to inflation, of course).
There is a very real tendency among
many adults to romanticize childhood, to make it sound as
if it's the best of all possible times, but we also have
to remember the temper tantrums, the hissy fits, the not
wanting to share, the crankiness when they're tired (but
that's me, too), the not listening when they're told to
do something, even (especially?) when that something is dangerous. I
think we must take the best from
children, though, and I think that has to do with
perspective, appreciation, awe, and action.
I think
we need to think less--we overvalue our cognitive
capabilities, without realizing just how often we
complicate things much more than they need to be
complicated, or we think too much and assign designs and
motives to other people's actions and words that just
aren't there. Everyone's a psychoanalyst these days,
thanks to poor television programs and movies, and few
people are willing just to let people be people, and
accept them for what they are.
We can be like kids in seeing the
wonder of the trees and the flowers and the cows by the
side of the road (FORGET the methane!). We can be
like kids when we see the extraordinary power and beauty
of the mountains. We can be like children when we
meet other people and want to find out who they are, not
what they make or what their social class is.
I'm glad there are children around,
for, as much as I hate to say it, I would get incredibly
bored being around adults all the time. Adults seem
rarely to want to play, to want to enjoy themselves, to
want to take chances and discover new things and draw or paint without worrying what people will say about their
art or their abilities.
Thanks, kids, for brightening my life.
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Children need models
more than they
need critics.
Joseph Joubert
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We can't
form our children on our own concepts;
we must take them
and love them
as God gives them to us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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Your
children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for
itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you
cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like
you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday
Khalil Gibran |
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We
find delight in the beauty and happiness of children
that
makes the heart too big for the body.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Little children are still the symbol
of the
eternal marriage between love and duty.
George Eliot
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Nurse's Song
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of the night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies."
"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep."
"Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed."
The little ones leaped and shouted and laughed
And all the hills echoed.
William Blake
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I hear babies cry
I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself,
"What a wonderful world."
Weiss/Thiele
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The Children's Hour
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall! |
They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there I will keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
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If it's hard for you
to daydream, hang around children and ask them
to tell you stories.
They are experts at using their imagination.
Boys and girls
freely use fantasy to cope with the pressures of life.
Unfortunately, many of us take ourselves much too seriously and,
in
the name of maturity and responsibility, work too hard. Take
time
for make-believe. Abandon yourself in play. I think
God gives us an imagination for a reason. Christ knows the
pressures we endure.
Perhaps this is one reason He encourages us
to "become as little children."
Jean Lush
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A
happy childhood can't be cured.
Mine'll hang around my neck like a
rainbow,
that's all, instead of a noose.
Hortense
Calisher
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If children are to keep alive
their inborn sense of wonder, they need
the companionship of at least
one adult who can share it, rediscovering
with them the joy, excitement,
and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel
Carson
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The spiritual
interests of children have a lot to teach us. . . . I have listened
to
children of eight or nine or ten getting to the heart of the
Bible.
I have found in elementary schools a good deal of spiritual
curiosity
that does not reflect mere indoctrination.
Robert Coles
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If
you can't hold children in your arms,
please hold them in your
heart.
Mother Clara
Hale |
What's
done to children,
they will do to society.
Karl Menninger |
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What
a father says to his children is not heard
by the world; but it will be
heard by posterity.
Jean
Paul Richter
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Perhaps
God gives us children not so much to perpetuate the human race;
God gives us children to give us companions who will make every possible
effort
to help us remember to be fully present and to live in the present.
Children are
the ultimate reminders that life is nothing more than a process, and
that as we
participate in it, it changes.
Children are willing to take on people who have
started to become static, to busy themselves with unimportant things,
and to lose contact with the world around them.
We are given children to help us to remember to live our lives,
not just rush through them.
Anne Wilson Schaef
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Play
is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious
learning.
But for children play is serious learning.
Play is
really the work of childhood.
Fred
Rogers
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Children
are not things to be molded,
but are people to be unfolded.
Jess Lair
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If you want your
children to keep their feet on the ground,
put some responsibility on
their shoulders.
Abigail van
Buren
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Children
are curious and are risk takers.
They have lots of courage.
They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous.
A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.
John
Bradshaw
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The
first duty to children is to make them happy.
If you have not made them so, you have wronged them.
No other good they may get can make up for that.
Charles
Buxton
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Adults find pleasure in
deceiving a child.
They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it.
The children very quickly figure it out
and then practice deception
themselves.
Elias Canetti
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Parents are often so
busy with the physical rearing of children
that they miss the glory of parenthood,
just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.
Marcelene Cox
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Children
have a remarkable talent for not taking the adult world with
the
kind of respect that 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 |
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Have
you ever watched small children playing alone in a room?
They will talk to themselves, and they will answer.
They will dress themselves up.
They sing and dance.
A small child in a room all alone can have a marvelous
time entertaining him or herself.
Children can do this not only because they have an
innocence that helps them to rise
above the cares of the world;
they don’t mind being alone with their thoughts and dreams.
They don’t mind acting out their fantasies.
They can live their lives beyond the expectations of
others. In a room
all alone, children have no inhibitions.
They have nothing to prove and no one to satisfy but
themselves. They
feel free!
They
are unencumbered by opinions and directives.
It happens because nobody is watching them.
Live your
life like nobody is watching you.
Iyanla
Vanzant |
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There
once was a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of
a number of things.
He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant
companion.
These two used to wonder all day long.
They wondered at
the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness
of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they
wondered
at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
Charles Dickens
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If
my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child,
I think there can be no happiness greater than this.
Kitaro Nishida
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Children ask better
questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?"
"Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow
say?" are far more
likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your
manuscript?"
"Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your
lawyer?"
Fran Lebowitz
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Don't limit a child to your own way of loving,
for the child was born in another time.
from a Rabbinical saying
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If
we are to reach real
peace in the world,
we shall have
to begin with children.
Mohandas
Gandhi
Let
us put our minds
together and see
what we will make
for our children.
Chief
Sitting Bull |
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The
greatest dreams on Earth I trust to you my child.
You are the seed of humankind, the hope, the future of the world.
Trán
Düc Uyén
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| When my little daughter Margaret was about five
years old, I was awakened one morning by the sound of her
childish voice in the nursery next to my room. It was
about six o'clock, and she was carrying on a great conversation
with herself, interspersed with bubbling laughter.
I went into the nursery and interrupted the monologue by
saying: "Margaret, this is a strange time for you to
be talking so noisily to yourself. You are disturbing
everyone who is trying to sleep in this house.
Furthermore," I continued, "it seems to me rather
foolish for you to lie there talking to yourself and laughing at
your own remarks."
"Oh, Daddy," she said in that tone with which
children immemorially have put parents in their proper place,
"Oh, Daddy, you don't understand. I have an awful
good time with myself."
Norman
Vincent Peale |
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Before
we can teach children life, we've got to learn again how to simply talk
with them. I would like to write a book called "How to Talk
with Children,"
because all I can see that goes on among adults and children is we're
always talking
at them, we're always talking through them or beyond them. We're
never communicating
with them. In order to really communicate with the kids, we've got
to practice
deep knee bends. We've got to get down there so we're face-to-face
with them.
We've got to try to get into their world and stop telling them about
ours.
Listen to them. Ask them to tell us what they see and feel and
hear, because,
you may be surprised, they may teach you something. It may get you
back
in touch with some of the wonder that was you and which you've
forgotten.
Leo
Buscaglia
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Parents
need to fill a child's bucket of self-esteem so high
that the rest of the world can't poke enough holes in it to drain it
dry.
Alvin
Price
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Children
are living beings--more living than grown-up people who have built
shells of habit around themselves. Therefore it is absolutely
necessary
for their mental health and development that they should not have mere
schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal
love.
Rabindranath
Tagore
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