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

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

Will, therefore, is the unbroken determination to exercise free choice as well as self-restraint, in spite of the unavoidable experience of shame and doubt in infancy.

You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.

Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact ... the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.