“The child’s mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind.”

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.

When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.

Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

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.

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.

Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.

If the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.

The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man’s organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.

Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.

To confer the gift of drawing, we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task, the whole life must cooperate. In this sense, life itself is the only preparation for drawing.

The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.

Personal health is related to self-control and to the worship of life in all its natural beauty – self-control bringing with it happiness, renewed youth, and long life.

I must take issue with the term ‘a mere child’, for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Maturity – among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don’t teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply… For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that’s the inheritor of our fear.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.