Great Throughts Treasury

"Each society and each age must find the institutionalized form of reverence which derives vitality from its world image."

"Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom. "

"It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you."

"Doubt is the brother of shame. "

"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness."

"The richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play."

"Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."

"For when established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases."

"Do not mistake a child for his symptom. "

"Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired."

"True equality can only mean the right to be uniquely creative."

"The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy. "

"If there is any responsibility in the cycle of life it must be that one generation owes to the next that strength by which it can come to face ultimate concerns in its own way. "

"Love... is mutuality of devotion forever subduing the antagonisms inherent in divided functions. "