“One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.”

With man, the life of the body depends on the life of the spirit.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

Joy, feeling one’s own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.

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.

I was an only child, a very late child, born to parents who were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. That kind of confirmed my sense of being the center of the universe, which I guess every child feels – children and poets both tend to feel.

Nobody has that vulnerability any more. We turn to child models in an instinctive search for that innocence and freshness, but they don’t have the deep feminine sexuality that came from Marilyn like light.

As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be ‘better’ children.

The U.S. Constitution contains no right for a child to go to school, let alone for a child to go to a good school. And yet, we know that if they don’t go to a good school, they’re less likely to be able to realize all that this country has to offer.

We can see the child moving rather serenely in the uterus. The child senses aggression in its sanctuary. We see the child’s mouth wide open in a silent scream.

It’s hilarious, a bit crazy, and it should make anyone wonder why people put their careers in the hands of these idiotsand remember I’m one of them. If you have a child, make sure he or she reads this before starting at the bottom- anywhere.

I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.