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It is only by introducing the young to great
literature, drama and music,
and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the
possibilities that lie within the human spirit--enable them to see visions
and dream dreams. -Eric Anderson
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And then
I thought: what fools we are with our children--always
plotting what we shall make of them,
always planning for
a future that never comes,
always intent on what they may
be,
never accepting what they are. -Howard Vincent O'Brien
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I must
take issue
with
the
term "a mere
child,"
for it
has
been my invariable
experience that the
company
of a
mere
child is infinitely
preferable to that
of
a mere
adult. -Fran Lebowitz |
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To
carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood,
to combine the child's sense of wonder
and novelty
with the appearances which every day for
years has rendered familiar,
this is the character and
privilege of genius,
and one of the marks which
distinguish it from talent. -Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
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The
only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.
-Joe
Houldsworth
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who help a child help humanity
with an immediateness
which no other help given to human
creature in any other
stage of human life can
possibly give again. -Phillips Brooks
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What
the majority of American children needs is to stop being
pampered,
stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured,
stop being catered to. In the final analysis, it is not
what you do for your children but
what you have taught
them to do for themselves
that will make them successful
human beings. -Ann
Landers
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For
the children of the world
Every single little boy and girl
Heaven plants a special seed
And we must have faith for these
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in the Father's eyes
Like the Father may we see
That they have a destiny
And give them the light of love to lead
Through the darkness around us now
To a place where hope is found
Sims/Grant/Kirkpatrick
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Our religion is one which challenges
the ordinary human standards
by holding that the ideal of
life is the spirit of a little child. We tend
to glorify
adulthood and wisdom and worldly prudence, but the Gospel
reverses all this. The Gospel says that the inescapable
condition
of entrance into the divine fellowship is that
we turn and become
as a little child. As against our
natural judgment we must become
tender and full of wonder
and unspoiled by the hard skepticism
on which we so often
pride ourselves. But when we really look
into the heart
of a child, willful as he or she may be, we are often
ashamed.
God has sent children into the world, not only to
replenish it,
but to serve as sacred reminders of
something ineffably precious which
we are always in
danger of losing. The sacrament of childhood is thus a
continuing revelation. -Elton Trueblood |
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| Love your children with all your hearts,
love them enough
to discipline them before it is too late.
. . Praise them for
important things, even if you have to
stretch them a bit. Praise them a lot. They live on
it like bread and butter
and they need it more than bread
and butter. -Lavina
Christensen
Fugal |
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Know you what it is to
be a child? It is to be something very different from
the person of today. It
is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of
baptism;
it is to believe in love, to believe in
loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little
that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to
turn pumpkins into coaches,
and mice into horses, lowness
into loftiness and nothing into everything,
for each
child has its fairy godmother in its soul.
-Francis
Thompson |
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we had paid no more attention
to our plants than we have
to our
children, we would now be
living in a jungle of weed. -Luther
Burbank |
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The
real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do
for the joy and love
of doing it, apart from any profit,
compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the
real living
of life with the feeling of freedom and self-expression. Play is the
business
of childhood, and its continuation in
later years is the prolongation of youth.
-Walter
Rauschenbach |
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Children
are not casual guests in our home. They have been loaned to us
temporarily
for the purpose of loving them and instilling
a
foundation of values on
which
their future lives will be built.
-James
Dobson
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Every
child should know a hill,
And the clean joy of running down its long slope
With the wind in his hair.
He should know a tree--
The comfort of its cool lap of shade,
And the supple strength of its arms
Balancing him between earth and sky
So he is a creature of both.
He should know bits of singing water--
The strange mysteries of its depths,
And the long sweet grasses that border it.
Every child should know some scrap
Of uninterrupted sky, to shout against;
And have one star, dependable and bright,
For wishing on.
Edna Casler Joll |
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For
a Child
Your friends shall be the tall wind,
The river and the tree;
The sun that laughs and marches,
The swallow and the sea.
Your prayers shall be the murmur
Of grasses in the rain;
The song of wildwood thrushes
That makes God glad again. |
And you shall run and wander
And you shall dream and sing
Of brave things and of bright things
Beyond the swallow's wing.
And you shall envy no man,
Nor hurt your heart with sighs,
For I will keep you simple
That God may make you wise.
Fanny Stearns Davis |
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Sometimes
looking deep into the eyes of a child,
you are conscious
of meeting a glance full
of wisdom. The child has
known nothing yet
but love and beauty. All this
piled-up world
knowledge you have acquired is unguessed
at
by her. And yet you meet this wonderful look
that
tells you in a moment more than all the
years of
experience have seemed to teach.
-Hildegarde
Hawthorne
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Every
child comes with
the message that God is not
yet discouraged
of us. -Rabindranath Tagore
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You may give them
your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
Khalil Gibran
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It might sound a
paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children
occupied more sheer hours of parental time --but the truth is that we
neglected you.
We allowed you a
charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions
on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground
for true independence.
We pronounced you
strong when you were still weak in order to avoid
the struggles with you
that would have fed your true strength.
We proclaimed you
sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part
in the long,
slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind
and feeling.
Thus, it was no
small anomaly of your growing up that while you were
the most indulged
generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned
to your own
meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.
-Midge
Decter
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I believe the powers of observation
in numbers of very young children to be
quite wonderful
for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most
grown people who are remarkable in this respect, may with
greater propriety
be said not to have lost the faculty,
than to have acquired it; the rather,
as I generally
observe such people to retain a certain freshness, and
gentleness,
and capacity of being pleased, which are also
an inheritance
they have preserved from their childhood.
-Charles Dickens
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I love little children, and it is not a slight thing
when they,
who are
fresh from God, love us. -Charles Dickens |
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The
Kingdom of Ideas
Wilferd A. Peterson
To enter
the Kingdom of Ideas, become as a little child.
"There
is nothing more resembles God's eyes," wrote Nikos
Kazantzakis, "than the eyes of a child."
A child
has wide-eyed interest in everything. As God did, he looks
upon the world and finds it good.
A child
does not block the flow of goodness into her life by thoughts of
fear and prejudice. Her mind is as open as are her eyes.
She experiences the wonder of life.
A child
is an explorer. He is curious. He wants to know what
is on the other side of the moon, or the room. He
investigates things to find out what they are and how they
work. He asks questions. He loves to experiment.
A child
lives in the world of fantasy where all great ideas are
born. It was probably a child who first dreamed of flying
through the air, hearing voices and music from the sky,
penetrating to the ocean depths. Before the reality comes
the dream.
A child
has the magic gift of imagination. She sees things that
aren't there. She creates in her mind the kind of a world
she wants to live in. She visualizes things as she wants
them to be.
A child
has freshness of response. To him the world is ever new
and full of miracles and adventures. He reacts
spontaneously to the discoveries he makes each day.
A child
follows the simple way. She does not become bogged down in
the complex and the obscure. She is natural, direct and
genuine.
A child
is confident. He has not learned all of the reasons why a
thing cannot be done. He ignores obstacles because he does
not know they exist.
This we
learn from the child: The more childlike we are in our
approach to problems, the more creative we will be. Try
the fresh approach of a child.
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People with bad consciences always
fear the
judgment of children. -
Mary McCarthy |
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The
world was not left to us by our parents;
it was lent to us by our children.
-African
Proverb |
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It is infinitely more useful for a child to
hear a story told by a person than
by computer. Because the greatest part of the learning
experience lies not in the
particular words of the story but in the involvement with
the individual reading it. -
Frank Smith |
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Who of us is mature
enough for offspring before the offspring themselves
arrive?
The value of marriage is not that adults
produce children but that children produce adults.
-Peter DeVries |
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The
best compliment to children or
friends
is
the feeling you
give them
that they have been
set free
to make
their own
inquiries,
to come to
conclusions
that are right for them,
whether or
not they coincide with your own. -Alistair Cooke |
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I think that the ideals of youth are fine,
clear
and unencumbered; and that the real art of living
consists in keeping alive the conscience and
sense of
values we had when we were young. -Rockwell
Kent |
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Children not only have to learn what
their parents
learned in school, but also have to learn how
to learn.
This has to be recognized as a new
problem which is only partly solved.
-Margaret Mead |
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Oh, what a tangled web
do parents weave
when they think that their children are
naive. -Ogden Nash |
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To become mature is to
recover that sense
of seriousness which one had as a
child at play. -Friedrich
Nietzsche |
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We can't
form our children on our own concepts;
we must take them
and love them
as God gives them to us.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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I advise the young to
tell themselves constantly
that most often it is up to
them alone. -Andre Gide |
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Youth is a wonderful thing.
What a crime to
waste it on children. -George Bernard Shaw |
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A
happy childhood can't be cured.
Mine'll hang around my neck like a
rainbow,
that's all, instead of a noose. -Hortense
Calisher |
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Children need models
more than they
need critics. -Joseph Joubert |
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Your
children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for
itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you
cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like
you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday
Khalil Gibran |
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We
find delight in the beauty and happiness of children
that
makes the heart too big for the body.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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Little children are still the symbol
of the
eternal marriage between love and duty.
-George Eliot |
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Nurse's Song
When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.
"Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,
And the dews of the night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies."
"No, no, let us play, for it is yet day,
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly,
And the hills are all cover'd with sheep."
"Well, well, go and play till the light fades away,
And then go home to bed."
The little ones leaped and shouted and laughed
And all the hills echoed.
William Blake
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I hear babies cry
I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself,
"What a wonderful world."
Weiss/Thiele |
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If it's hard for you
to daydream, hang around children and
ask them
to tell you stories.
They are experts at using their
imagination. Boys and girls
freely use fantasy to cope with the
pressures of life.
Unfortunately, many of us take ourselves
much too seriously and,
in
the name of maturity and responsibility,
work too hard. Take
time
for make-believe. Abandon yourself in play.
I think
God gives us an imagination for a reason. Christ knows the
pressures we endure.
Perhaps this is one reason He encourages us
to "become as little children."
-Jean Lush |
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The spiritual
interests of children have a lot to teach us. . . . I have listened
to
children of eight or nine or ten getting to the heart of the
Bible.
I have found in elementary schools a good deal of spiritual
curiosity
that does not reflect mere indoctrination.
-Robert Coles |
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| When my little daughter Margaret was about five
years old, I was awakened one morning by the sound of her
childish voice in the nursery next to my room. It was
about six o'clock, and she was carrying on a great conversation
with herself, interspersed with bubbling laughter.
I went into the nursery and interrupted the monologue by
saying: "Margaret, this is a strange time for you to
be talking so noisily to yourself. You are disturbing
everyone who is trying to sleep in this house.
Furthermore," I continued, "it seems to me rather
foolish for you to lie there talking to yourself and laughing at
your own remarks."
"Oh, Daddy," she said in that tone with which
children immemorially have put parents in their proper place,
"Oh, Daddy, you don't understand. I have an awful
good time with myself."
Norman
Vincent Peale |
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The Children's Hour
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall! |
They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there I will keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
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I'm glad there are children around,
for, as much as I hate to say it, I would get incredibly
bored being around adults all the time. Adults seem
rarely to want to play, to want to enjoy themselves, to
want to take chances and discover new things and draw or paint without worrying what people will say about their
art or their abilities. -Tom Walsh |
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A. Peterson
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