“When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.”

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.

This is the age in which language and movement develop. The child must be safeguarded in order that these activities may develop freely.

The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one’s own hand – that is what is necessary.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.

Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

Man is capable of every great heroism; it was man who found a means of conquering the formidable obstacles of his environment, establishing himself lord of the earth, and laying the foundations of civilization.

The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother’s milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.

The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.

Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school.

a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.

All diseases begin in the gut.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

All disease begins in the gut.

If you ever want something badly, let it go. If it comes back to you, then it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never yours to begin with.

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.