Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

Character | Childhood | Immortality | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

Genius is childhood recaptured.

Childhood | Genius | Wisdom |

Carl Victor de Bonstetten

If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain.

Age | Childhood | Memory | Old age | Thought | Wisdom | Words | Old | Thought |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.

Belief | Childhood | Control | Evolution | Experience | Human race | Individual | Man | Means | Obedience | Race | Religion | Society | Trust | Wisdom | World | Society |

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.

Age | Childhood | Fear | Individual | Life | Life | Men | Nothing | Paradise | Sense | Shame | Wisdom |

Charles Lamb

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child’s heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Childhood | Heart | Wisdom | World |

Frederick Seitz

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

Childhood | Curiosity | Good | Wisdom |

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Hold childhood in reverence and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Give nature time to work before you take over her tasks, lest you interfere with her method.

Childhood | Good | Hurry | Method | Nature | Reverence | Time | Wisdom | Work |

Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

One of the principal ingredients in the happiness of childhood is freedom from suspicion - why may it not be combined with a more extensive intercourse with mankind? A disposition to dwell on the bright side of character is like gold to its possessor; but to imagine more evil than meets the eye, betrays affinity for it.

Character | Childhood | Evil | Freedom | Gold | Mankind | Suspicion | Wisdom | Happiness |

Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

I study much, and the more I study, the oftener I go back to those first principles which are so simple that childhood itself can lisp them.

Childhood | Principles | Study | Wisdom |

Abraham Sutzkever

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Childhood | Wisdom |

Edward Young

The more we live, more brief appear our life’s succeeding stages; a day to childhood seems a year, and years like passing ages.

Childhood | Day | Life | Life | Wisdom |

Yukio Mishima

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

Childhood | Space | Time |