Popular quotes about Childhood! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 46
While childhood, and while dreams, producing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.
Charles LambPlay is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a childs soul.โโข โPlay is the highest level of child development . . . It gives . . . joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world . . . The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.โโข โChildren are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.
Friedrich FrobelI don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
Fernando PessoaI think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.
Maurice SendakTo experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.
David Foster WallaceWe find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep inthe memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.
Selma FraibergThe loss of my childhood was the price for becoming the youngest world champion in history. When you have to fight every day from a young age, your soul can be contaminated. I lost my childhood. I never really had it. Today I have to be careful not to become cruel, because I became a soldier too early.
Garry KasparovAnd I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.
Wes AndersonChildhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age. The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Edna St. Vincent MillayI think I'm still fed by my childhood experience of reading, even though obviously I'm reading many books now and a lot of them are books for children but I feel like childhood reading is this magic window and there's something that you sort of carry for the rest of your life when a book has really changed you as a kid, or affected you, or even made you recognize something about yourself.
Rebecca SteadChildhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.
Kim Stanley RobinsonI read Norman Lockโs The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twainโs original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisyโand, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of Americaโs greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.
David OshinskyThe truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.
Alice MillerTo describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'
Pat ConroyLove childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?
Jean-Jacques RousseauI had a deprived childhood, you see. I had lots of other kids to play with and my parents bought me outdoor toys and refused to ill-treat me, so it never occurred to me to seek solitary consolation with a good book.
Terry PratchettProbably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Roberto BolanoOh, be assured, fellow teachers, that there is no time in life so favorable to sound conversion as early childhood.
Theodore L. CuylerAll feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.
Rainer Maria RilkePresently it appears that people are mainly concerned with being well rested. Those capable of uninterrupted sleep are much admired. Unconsciousness is in great demand. This is the day of the milligram. The rigors of learning how to do long division have been a traditional part of childhood, just like learning to smoke. In fact, as far as I am concerned, the two go hand in hand. Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke.
Fran LebowitzMy childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.
Emmeline PankhurstMan is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred.
Marek EdelmanThe dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.
Charles DickensI was born in 1953, in Paris. But soon after my birth my family (I have one sister) moved into a rent apartment in suburbs of Paris named Romainville. That time my parents were freshly married and it was extremely hard to find an apartment in Paris for a young married couple. To say they found a flat in a blocks of houses which was built after the second World War - and this is the place where I spent my childhood.
Richard ClaydermanSuccess is becoming in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood.
Nassim Nicholas TalebChildhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.
Lev S. VygotskyI didn't have a blueprint from my childhood that I could call on, which is an enormous deficit when you're trying to put together a family life. I didn't see a family life where men were thriving inside of it. You know, my dad tended to blame the family for his inability to achieve what he wanted to achieve, you know? So, unfortunately, I was coming from that particular frame of mind.
Bruce SpringsteenExcessive competitiveness, anxiety, hostility, suspiciousness, all originate in the nursery years. That is why, if we want a world of peace and not violence, love and not hate, cooperation and not murder, justice and not selfishness, we have to learn how to make childhood more happy. No nobler task could be pursued by our generation.
Joshua L. LiebmanWe are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.
Milan KunderaFlying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
Joyce Carol OatesI'm not the most sophisticated person. I'm not the smartest person in the world. But, I know what makes me excited about life, from Spielberg movies to Michael Jackson music videos to cartoons on Saturday mornings, which made my childhood.
Jon M. ChuAt key crossroads in his life, Vernon Davis has continued to make a conscious choice to grow as a person and player. His determination through adversity since his childhood days is commendable.
Hannah StormSome one has said of a fine and honorable old age, that it was the childhood of immortality.
John WolcotFor years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood
Harriet Ann JacobsChildhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.
P. D. JamesChildren make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?"
Sam MendesNot since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.
Paula SharpMany have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world โ Los Angeles in the '50s โ they made perfect sense.
Wanda ColemanIf we don't somehow stem the tide of childhood obesity, we're going to have a huge problem.
Lance ArmstrongAs ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.
Sally MannThe only thing that could hurt me is if my success encouraged me to return to my childhood fantasies of omnipotence - but that is not likely to happen as long as I remain engaged in the financial markets, because they constantly remind me of my limitations.
George SorosMy childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda.
Hamish BowlesChildhood was fairly solitary. I grew up in a very small town called Navan in County Meath. I never knew my father. He left when I was an infant and I was left in the care of my mother and my grandparents.
Pierce Brosnan