Great Throughts Treasury

"Instruction ends in the classroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated." -

"The question is, whether, like the Divine Child I the temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father’s business, and becoming wise to God." -

"To endure is the first thing a child ought to learn, and that which he will have most need to know." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"I wonder many times that ever a child of God should have a sad heart, considering what the Lord is preparing for him." - Samuel Rutherford

"Every person thinks his own intellect perfect, and his own child handsome." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"Perhaps a child who is fussed over gets a feeling of destiny, he thinks he is in the world for something important and it gives him drive and confidence." - Benjamin Spock, fully Benjamin McLane Spock

"There are only two things a child will share willingly - communicable diseases and his mothers age." - Benjamin Spock, fully Benjamin McLane Spock

"That man never grows old who keeps a child in his heart." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"A child awakened out of a deep sleep, expressed all the crying babies and all the weeping idealists in the world. "Oh, dear," he said, "I have lost my place in my dream."" - Lincoln Steffens, fully Joseph Lincoln Steffens

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better." - Anne Sullivan, fully Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Macy

"The child represents spontaneity and freshness, the deep urge of the human soul to explore its vast, unlimited territories. Our psyche always years to explore its fullness, and the child embodies that inner urge to break the boundaries of the known to explore the new, the fresh." - Edith Sullwold

"A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." -

"Do not say, "It is morning," and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a new-born child that has no name." -

"When a child begins to move in the midst of the objects that surround him, he is instinctively led to appropriate to himself everything that he can lay his hands upon; he has no notion of the property of others; but as he gradually learns the value of things and begins to perceive that he may in his turn be despoiled, he becomes more circumspect, and he ends by respecting those rights in others which he wishes to have respected in himself. The principle which the child derives from the possession of his toys is taught to the man by the objects which he may call his own." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"Like a child falling asleep over his toys, man loosens his grasp on earthly possessions only when death overtakes him." - Union Prayer Book NULL

"A mother once asked a clergyman when she should begin the education of her child which she told him was then four years old. “madam,” was the reply, “you have lose three years already. From the very first smile that gleams over the infant’s cheek, your opportunity begins." - Richard Whately

"Truth should be the first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature." - John Greenleaf Whittier

"Every child s born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility." - Kate Douglas Wiggin

"The child is father of the man." - William Wordsworth

"In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again; and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility toward human life." -

"The religion of a child depends on what its mother and father are, and not on what they say." - Henri Frédéric Amiel

"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another." - Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley, nicknamed Frater Perdurabo and The Great Bea

"A child is a man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve, or the Apple... He is Nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred notebook. He is purely happy because he knows no evil." - John Earle, Bishop of Salisbury

"It is not attention that the child is seeking but love." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"I have come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom… As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable, or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg

"Bringing a child into the world is the greatest act of hope there is." - Louise Hart

"The proper time to influence the character of a child is about 100 years before it is born." - William Ralph Inge

"A child is born through the rending of the womb; a man is born through the rending of the world. The call to prayer signalizes both kinds of birth, the first is uttered by the lips, the second by the very soul." - Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal

"Only by being permitted to experience the consequences of his actions will the child acquire a sense of responsibility; and within the limits marked by the demands of his safety this must be done. From such training we can expect many benefits to the person, one of which will certainly be the development of a natural rather than an imposed control over [himself]." - Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder

"Supported by the authority of all institutions, parenthood has come to amount to little more than a campaign against individuality. Every father and every mother trembles lest an offspring, in act or thought, should be different from his fellows; and the smallest display of uniqueness in a child becomes the signal for the application of drastic measures aimed at stamping out that small fire of noncompliance by which personal distinctness is expressed. In an atmosphere of anxiety, in a climate of apprehension, the parental conspiracy against children is planned." - Robert M. Linder, fully Robert Mitchell Linder

"Oh, give me vision to discern the child behind whatever he may do or say, the wise humility to learn from him the while I strive to teach him day by day." - Adelaide Love

"A saint is like a tree. He does not call anyone, neither does he send anyone away. He gives shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, from the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it." - Anandamayi Ma, fully Sri Anandamayi Ma, also Anandamayee Ma or Anandamoyi Ma

"Your child is mainly interested in the process of doing things; he is not very concerned with the end result." - Terry Malloy

"To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you." - Stella Terrill Mann

"It is easy to substitute our will for that of a child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality." - Maria Montessori

"Within the child lies the fate of the future." - Maria Montessori

"The most potent muse of all is our own inner child." -

"Children seem to learn to talk by inventing their own words and rules: by experimenting with language. Children make statements to adults and then wait for adults to put the statements into adult language so they can make a comparison… If the adult says nothing or simply continues the conversation, the child assumes his or her utterance is correct. When adults “correct” – that is, expand in adult language what the children have said – they are providing feedback. The adult and the child are actually speaking different languages, but they understand the situation, the child can compare their different ways of saying the same thing." - Judith M. Newman

"One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better." -

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." -

"Don’t limit your child to your own learning, for he was born in another time." -

"The roots of a child’s ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child’s having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers

"We can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them – no matter how impressive they may be – as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much – we simply grow taller. Oh, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tails." -

"It is not [a child’s] hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The only moral lesson which is suited for a child – the most important lesson for every time of life – is this, “Never hurt anybody.”" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"A child cannot “save his soul” in a vacuum - salvation must be effected in a social environment in which love of God and man must be in constant operation." - Roland Simonitsch

"Every human being, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is a child of God and therefore in possession of rights that even kings must respect." -

"To indoctrinate the child with the prevailing world-view of the society and class in which he has been born, to enforce conformity in later life by the thunders of the priest and by the sword of the magistrate has been “the wisdom of our ancestor” at every stage in their progress from savagery to civilization." - Preserved Smith

"A child has not yet been hypnotized by the world idea of limitation and lives naturally in harmony with its source. That is why most grown people love to be with children. They radiate the natural harmony of the Universe and that is the natural environment of man." - Baird T. Spalding