Childhood

“ For our own parts, we have been perfectly amazed at the work we have seen done by children of six or seven—bright, merry creatures, who have all the spirit of their childhood active in them, repressed by no parent’s selfish love of ease and silence, cowed by no dull-witted teacher of the A B C and the pothooks. ”

“ May the child have good thoughts and know its mother-earth, the giver of food. May it have good thoughts and grow from childhood to manhood. May the child be beautiful and happy. Here is the child's bed; may the child be beautiful and happy. Ashes man, let me make good medicine for the child. We will receive the child into our arms, that it may be happy and contented. May it grow from childhood to manhood. ”

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ The easy nursery-lessons of the prescholastic age, the story-books of childhood, the talk of parents and friends, all furnish food for leisurely reflection, all serve to suggest those strange questions that are one chief evidence of thoughtfulness in the young. ”

“ It is the complete volume that counts—not just one page. Follow your child through all his chapters of childhood, enter into his play and study and ambitions. There are so many little incidents that remain in the memory and permanently change the behavior. ”

“ Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments? ”

“ But, after all, long ago is long ago, and these glimpses of our happy childhood must necessarily be fragmentary and brief. I trust they may have given pleasure to some children. I wish all childhood might be as bright, as happy, as free from care or sorrow, as was ours. ”

“ Now this generation of children, when they come to maturity, marry—the earlier the more dependent they are and the less serious their views of life—and begin the story of their own parents, and their own childhood, all over again. ”

“ An infant’s misery makes!
We overrule, and over-teach,
We curb and we confine,
And put the heart to school too soon,
To learn our narrow line.
No; only taught by love to love,
Seems childhood’s natural task ”

“ "Childhood is the time of man's greatest content," said Ak, following the youth's thoughts. "'Tis during these years of innocent pleasure that the little ones are most free from care." ”

“ In Infancy, up to the fifth or sixth year, the purely physical development takes the precedence; Childhood is the time of learning, in a proper sense, an act by which the child gains for himself the picture of the world such as mature minds, through experience and insight, have painted it; and, finally, Youth is the transition period to practical activity, to which the self-determination of the will must give the first impulse. ”

“ Does not this rightly imply that between childhood and boyhood is fixed a perceptible gulf, physical, spiritual, psychological, and that in minds in which the powers and tendencies conspicuous in boyhood, and more or less dormant or latent in earlier years, predominate, those of childhood are apt to fade and fall away? ”

“ We must likewise attend to the early education of our children. It is during infancy and childhood that our heads are filled with "nursery tales" and marvellous stories. They are told us by those to whose care we are early intrusted, either to frighten us into obedience, to gratify our thirst for the new and wonderful, or to while away a tedious evening. ”

“ My mother used to say that the promise as to training up a child in the way he should go was not to be fulfilled in youth, but in age, and as my years advanced, I began to find that the training of childhood counted for more and more. ”

“ At the age of eight or nine, when the child emerges from infancy into early boyhood, he begins gradually and imperfectly to leave behind the characteristics of childhood and, with the development of his mental and physical processes, he acquires the distinguishing traits of the individualistic period. ”

“ So it is with the human being: the character and habit are directed easily in infancy, with difficulty during childhood, but they are well-nigh impossible of direction by the time adolescence is established. ”

“ And indeed it is doubtful whether one ever does take root again in the same sense as in the home of childhood, which is linked with the earliest associations of opening thought, and with all the hallowed ties that cluster around a child's happy home. ”

“ We should wonder at this peculiarity in childhood, if we were not accustomed to see in all, even the most minute among the laws of nature, a beneficent design, by which preparation is made for a future state of being; and here, in the demand of the child for a narrative which has often been repeated, we recognise a provision for impressing the plastic nature of its mind and feelings, with facts which shall never be effaced. ”

“ THE more we live, more brief appear
⁠Our life's succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems a year,
⁠And years like passing ages. ”

“ The children, moreover, who before seemed immortal in their childhood, now grew older, day by day, and came soon to be youths and maidens, and men and women by-and-by, and aged people, before they dreamed of such a thing. ”

“ This is only another way of saying that childhood is the most suggestible period of life. Precisely because the critical faculty is then undeveloped the child readily accepts and translates into some form of action the suggestions impinging on his mind from the external world. ”

“ Great importance attaches, therefore, from the point of view of mental efficiency and stability in adult life, to the influences which control the development of the conative trends during childhood and adolescence. ”

“ While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. ”

“ By constant repetition from one generation to another, incidents likely to happen in everyday life, which represented universal experiences and satisfied common needs of childhood, were selected and combined. ”

“ This is not an exclusive list; the attempt has been made to have it a practical, workable list, for parents and teachers and librarians to consult, bringing to it their own personal judgment as to individual taste and development of the child under consideration. Such a term as “the child” has been used reluctantly, since there is no other term, more human, less mechanical, to take its place. Because of this dislike for a stereotyped grading of childhood, the reader will here find no indication as to age demands. ”

“ Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. ”

“ HAVING now discussed the more important matters relative to child­hood, we may advance another stage with our subject, and take into consideration a few of the many important matters which pertain to the period of adolescence, which is the transition-state from childhood to womanhood. ”

“ Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in after-life the images first presented to it. ”

“ Now the person who is preparing to be a teacher should grow back into his childhood. Without losing the dignity or purpose of mature life, he should allow the memories and sympathies of childhood to revive. The insight which comes from companionship and sympathy with children he needs in order to guide them with tact and wisdom. ”

“ It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever. ”

“ Let positive, strong, helpful thought enter into their brains from very childhood. Lay yourselves open to these thoughts, and not to weakening and paralysing ones. ”

“ The backward pull of the tendencies of infancy and childhood, forming, as they do, the foundation upon which all subsequent desires and aspirations are built up; the closeness of the similarity between the situation of the adult confronted with the vast and overwhelming power of Nature and that of the child who helplessly depends upon his parents both for happiness and life—these are influences which may well continue to make religion in some form a permanent necessity. ”

“ To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; ”

“ Between childhood, we say, and maturity; it is the transition from one to the other. When human beings, then, are neither boys nor men, girls nor women, they must be for a few years anomalous creatures, must they? ”

“ I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. ”

“ From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster--that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys. ”

“ How lovely is the sleep of childhood! What worlds of sweet, yet not utterly sweet, associations, does it not mingle with the envy of our gaze! What thoughts and hopes and cares and forebodings does it not excite! There lie in that yet ungrieved and unsullied heart what unnumbered sources of emotion! what deep fountains of passion and woe! Alas! whatever be its earlier triumphs, the victim must fall at last! ”

“ Children see in their parents the past, they again in their children the future; and if we find more love in parents for their children than in children for their parents, this is sad and natural. Who does not fondle his hopes more than his recollections?—Eötvös. ”

“ I look back to a happy childhood. ”

“ If it faithfully depict the psychology of child life, of adolescence, of dawning maturity, devoid though it be of plot and, as a whole, of dramatic interest, it may yet, as a typical human portrait, justify itself; may aid the young to a better understanding of their own natures, and help those no longer young to a keener remembrance, a deeper sympathy, and a broader tolerance concerning the struggles, problems, and complexities that beset the young lives around them. ”

“ What can the child have, if she spends her life here? No education, no pleasure,—nothing. Nice little place, no doubt, for those that are used to it, but—Lord! a child that has the whole world before her, to pick and choose! ”

“ Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school. ”

“ How profoundly does this truth apply to the raw material of education,—the children who enroll in the schools! Under your very eyes they lose their childish ways, feel their steps along the precipice of adolescence, enter the wonderland of imagery and idealism, and pass on into the maturity of life. How vain is our hope that the child may remain a child; how worthless our prayer that adult life shall never lay her heavy burden of cares and responsibilities upon his beloved shoulders. ”

“ Therefore it is not wonderful that you, endowed as you were with all the qualities of a good child, with obedience, innocence, love of learning, modesty, and with harmless merriment, should have been the joy and delight of your parents and teachers, a spectacle to God, to angels, and to men! Yes, fair and golden were the days of your first youth, which you spent under the parental roof, beneath an unclouded sky. ”

“ For all that surrounds a child, all that it sees, hears, feels or touches, helps to create its moral and intellectual nature. See then how fortunate were my first six years. My physical being was well cared for by loving parents in a sweet orderly home, and my mental life well fed by books stimulating the imagination. ”

“ During that magic part of a child’s growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? ”

“ With the child, life is all play and fairy-tales and learning the external properties of “things;” with the youth, it is bodily exercises of a more systematic sort, novels of the real world, boon-fellowship and song, friendship and love, nature, travel and adventure, science and philosophy; with the man, ambition and policy, acquisitiveness, responsibility to others, and the selfish zest of the battle of life. ”