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.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

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.

You've got to learn to accept the law of life, and face the fact that we disintegrate slowly.

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.

Play is the most natural method of self-healing that childhood affords.

Life doesn't make any sense without interdependence. We need each other, and the sooner we learn that, the better for us all.