Best 2381 quotes in «childhood quotes» category

His mother's name was Rose, and when he was big enough to tie his shoes and stop wetting the bed, he was going to marry her.

Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, "They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting." Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, "He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death." Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason. The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin. You fail to see that this very facility proves that they are not learning. Their shining, polished brain reflects, as in a mirror, the things you show them, but nothing sinks in. The child remembers the words and the ideas are reflected back; his hearers understand them, but to him they are meaningless. Although memory and reason are wholly different faculties, the one does not really develop apart from the other. Before the age of reason the child receives images, not ideas; and there is this difference between them: images are merely the pictures of external objects, while ideas are notions about those objects determined by their relations.

Honour looked so much like a child herself, confined to bed, a white nightgown, like one of those maudlin Victorian dolls. Her cheeks were red, like someone had painted them, but I knew it was from rubbing, wiping away her melancholy.

How beautiful it is to feel that what you cannot describe?

How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.

How do you explain to a child who likes everyone in the world that adult life consists to a great extent of cutting people away?

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy?

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal farther?

How strange it is that when I was a child I tried to be like a grownup, yet as soon as I ceased to be a child I often longed to be like one.

Hoy, cuando todo el mundo escribe para los niños, seria una buena idea hacer, por una ver, un libro escrito por los niños para las personas mayores. Pero la cosa es difícil, si hay que permanecer en el caracter

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera. Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the "forests of symbols." (The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

I am an atheist on a mission to fulfill the commandment of Jesus Christ in Matthew 18: 2-6. If you believe Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior you are aware that repenting for the sin of 'IGNORING' the world's 'CHILDREN' is fatuous.

I climb aboard my tricycle and pedal my heart to the stars.

I am not my mother. I love her, but I am not her.

I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?

I believe the adventure of being a child is in discovering our talents, discovering the things we're really good at, in order to use our talent in some way to impact the world, in whatever way that may be.

I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles -- tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.... I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.

I cannot overemphasize the impact our childhood has on our ability to be honest because we live out what we learned as children in our adult relationships.

Ideas, when you're a kid, are a bit like seeds scattered in the wind. Some don't make it; they get carried away on the breeze, forgotten about and never mentioned again. Others take root. They dig their way down, they grow and they spread.

I didn't grow up in a Norman Rockwell house... my house was more akin to Norman Lear.

I am not sure that you can be taught how to love. In many ways it is innate - just watch and see what small child effortlessly does. But you can be reminded of it and invited to it and reminded of it.

... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them...

I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

I'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song." I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old....just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something.

I do not love. Love is only for women who are complete. I cannot love while my heart lacks safety and in my wallet there is enough money to pay for a loaf of bread. I cannot kiss you while I am thinking of the house rent and the electricity bills. I cannot behave as a mature woman who can exchange with you phrases of love while my childhood is not yet complete. This is an unfair compromise for safety and for existence.   We only call it love to preserve our dignity.

I don't know why you weren't around for him and Jase but I know you love them. You knew Gran and Gramps would give them everything you felt you couldn't

I don't think she ever knew that a deep-brooding love hung over everything she touched.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

I endeavor to recall the happy comforting dreams interrupted by my returning to consciousness of reality, but to my astonishment so soon as I recapture the thread of my former reverie I find it impossible to go on with it and, most astonishing of all, my imaginings no longer afford me any pleasure.

(...) if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real.

I do not think I liked being a child very much. It seemed like something one was intended to endure, not enjoy: a fifteen-year-long sentence to a world less interesting than the one that the other race inhabited.

I don't have anything to give you, except to show you a way to better yourself.

I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.

I do to miss my childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in simple things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not away from things, or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy.

I enjoy load shedding in Nepal, when it allows me to witness the dancing of fireflies in the next field, and at the same time to hear children playing a chanting clapping game because there is no TV to waste their time on.

If a child’s emotional and intellectual freedom is restricted, their development and well-being suffer, which leads to complex problems in later life. Deprivation of thought and emotion results in an irrationality of cognition, feeling, and communication.

If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, [quoting Donald Winnicott] ‘the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.’ Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust it its caregiver’s needs, means the child perceives that ‘something is wrong’ with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction.

I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

If I'd been a cowboy, it might've ended well. Somewhere on the ramble, I'm sure I'd have to sell My guns along the highway. My coins to the table To make a gambler's double, I'd double debts to pay. Prob'ly shrink and slink away, It mightn't've ended well. What If I'd been a sailor? I think it might've ended well. From August to May For a searat of man drifting through eternal blue, aboard the finest Debris. I might've called the shanties. From daybreak to storm's set, lines stay Taught, over rhythm unbroken. But, oh, there's a schism unspoken, a mighty calling of the lee. An absentminded Pirate, unaccustomed to the sea; To the land, a traitor. I think it mightn't've ended well. What might've worked for me? What might've ended well? Soldier, to bloody sally forth through hell? Teacher of glorious stories to tell? Man of gold, or stores to sell? Lover to a gentle belle? Maybe a camel; A seashell. What mightn't've been a life where it mightn't've ended well?

I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book of its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.

If nature was your good friend when you were a child, you must then know that you it will remain your good friend till the end of your life!

If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost in the mountain, doesn't it? And dies in the night, in the cold.

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.

If somewhere deep within me arises some essence of having been a child, one I never experienced, perhaps the purest childness of my childhood, I don’t want to know it. Without even looking, I want to form an angel out of it and hurl him into the foremost rank of screaming angels, to remind God.

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.