Great Throughts Treasury

"No two individuals have the same vision of life. It is said that only children and sages are happy because the child has not developed a material sense of value and the same knows that the material has no value. To them form is not the point of consideration but living life." - Baird T. Spalding

"Concentration is the key that opens up to the child the latent treasures within him." - E. M. Standing

"The adult works to perfect his environment, whereas the child works to perfect himself, using the environment as the means… The child is a being in a constant state of transformation." - E. M. Standing

"When a child takes his first steps alone, stumbles, and falls, we would never say he failed. Failing is a part of the learning process. Reframing the meaning of our own shortcomings and failures can be an important step in our personal growth." - Richard “Rick” Stone

"[Growing up] is especially difficult to achieve for a child whose parents do not take him seriously; that is, who do not expect proper behavior from him, do not discipline him, and finally, do not respect him enough to tell him the truth." -

"Of all the love, kindness and pleasure a man can experience in this world, nothing is more beautiful than the love of a woman. If it is granted him, and the two have a child together, they are fused in a single heart in the child, which is truly the most pleasing thing love and kindness can give, and this will always be a bond between them." - T’ai-p’ing-ching [Classic of the Highest Peace or Book of Supreme Peace] by Yü Chi NULL

"need love’s tender lesson taught as only weakness can; God has His small interpreters; the child must teach the man." - John Greenleaf Whittier

"The Child is the father of the Man." - William Wordsworth

"Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise." -

"The death of a child is the greatest reason to doubt the existence of God." -

"I remember that one time Carl [Sagan] was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, "Do something meaningful."" -

"What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving them pleasure, of being a credit to them, and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself?" -

"Every child is a genius, but is enslaved by the misconceptions of self-doubt of the adult world, and spends much of his or her time having to unlearn that perspective." -

"One of the most meaningful gifts a parent can give a child is to admit her own mistake: to say, "I was wrong here," or, "I'm sorry."" - John Gottman and Nan Silver

"Are you on your child's back or his team? Get off his back; get on his team." - Howard G. Hendricks

"I will be grateful for the twenty-four hours that are before me. Time is a precious commodity. I refuse to allow what little time I have to be contaminated by self-pity, anxiety, or boredom. I will face this day with the joy of a child and the courage of a giant. I will drink each minute as though it is my last. When tomorrow comes, today will be gone forever. While it is here, I will use it for loving and giving. Today I will make a difference." - Max Lucado

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

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

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. You are a child of the universe with no less than the trees and the stars." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. You are a child of the universe with no less than the trees and the stars." -

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. You are a child of the universe with no less than the trees and the stars." -

"It takes a village to raise a child." - African Proverbs

"It takes a village to raise a child." -

"Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -

"Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -

"Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -

"If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others." - Alice Duer Miller

"Thus with love. They err who think that they have but to learn about love, if they are to come by it. And that man hoodwinks himself who drifts through life hoping to be vanquished by love, learning by fitful fevers to enjoy brief stirrings of the heart, ever thinking to encounter that supreme fever which will enkindle his whole life; though, by reason of his pettiness of mind and the insignificance of the hill he has climbed, it can be but a short-lived exaltation of his heart. Thus, too, love is no sure resting place if it does not transform itself from day to day, like a child in the womb... For all that is neither ascent nor a transition lacks significance." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"There is no sure way to guarantee that your child will grow up to be the kind of person you would like him to be. The most likely way is for you to be the kind of person you would like him to be." - Author Unknown NULL

"Eloquence is the child of knowledge." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"The future of the world would be assured if every child were loved." - Bernie S. Siegel

"There is no possible method of compelling a child to feel sympathy or affection." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative." - Cesare Pavese

"A man that depends on the riches and honors of this world, forgetting God and the welfare of his soul, is like a little child that holds a fair apple in the hand, of agreeable exterior, promising goodness, but that within its rotten and full of worms." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"When the dust of evening had come on, and not a sound disturbed the sacred stillness of the place, when the bright moon poured in her light on tomb and monument, on pillar, wall, and arch, and most of all (it seemed to them) upon her quiet grave - in that calm time, when all outward things and inward thoughts teem with assurances of immortality, and worldly hopes and fears are humbled in the dust before them, then, with tranquil and submissive hearts they turned away, and left the child with God." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"The essential difference between a good and a bad education is this, that the former draws on the child to learn by making it sweet to him, the latter drives the child to learn, by making it sour to him if he does not." - Charles Buxton

"Gambling is the child of avarice, but the parent of prodigality." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Do not others expect from children more perfect conduct then they themselves exhibit? If a gracious child should lose his temper or act wrongly in some trifling thing through forgetfulness, straight-away he is condemned as a little hypocrite by those who are a long way from being perfect themselves." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Have charity; have patience; have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak - above all, any little child - to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste - never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer - crush what is finest and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature." -

"To be elated at success and disappointed at failure is to be the child of circumstances; how can such a one be called master of himself?" - Chinese Proverbs

"Time always seems long to the child who is waiting -- for Christmas, for next summer, for becoming a grownup: long also when he surrenders his whole soul to each moment of a happy day." - Dag Hammarskjöld

"Don't laugh at a child's ambitions. There is no sting so sharp as ridicule, and a laugh is often ridicule to a child. What a parent should do when he knows his child is overreaching, is to talk it over with him from every angle, and, if possible, find an angle from which the job can be attacked with hope of success. Then urge him forward, give him every encouragement. Above all, don't help your child to do something that he can accomplish on his own. Don't deny him the priceless privilege and thrill of developing his own success." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey

"The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher." - Elbert Green Hubbard

"The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities." - Eric Hoffer

"Do not mistake a child for his symptom." -

"A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit." - François Rabelais

"To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." - George Santayana