Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: ‘A book never does any harm if it is well written.’ While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: ‘But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them!’ This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.
childquotes
To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.
child / truth / undiscovered
What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.
The spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child.
The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
A man is never as big as when he is on his knees to help a child.
You need only look at the way in which she is formed, to see that woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body. She pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of child-bearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion.
child / Life / pains / submission / woman
Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected.
child / discernment / experience / teacher / views
Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
Wrap your coat, O sublime dream, around the child.