“Moral Education is the source of that spiritual equilibrium on which everything else depends and which may be compared to that physical equilibrium or sense of balance, without which it is impossible to stand upright or to move into any other position.”

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.

If the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.

The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.

The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

In the first three years of life, the foundations of physical and also of psychic health are laid. In these years, the child not only increases in size but passes through great transformations.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.

You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you.

Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity… life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t?

Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I’m more interested in, there’s the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

If you can’t find good in your own country, you won’t find it anywhere else.

We mortals are composed of two great schools Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.