Experience With Children Quotes & Sayings

The new program for children in failing schools will be the largest statewide school choice program in the nation. The creation of that program plus the expansion of two others illustrates that states with the greatest experience with school choice are the most likely to expand it. — Clint Bolick

Pedaling down Dune Drive on a red beach cruiser, Dani ahead of her and Vanessa behind her, is a transporting experience. The night is quiet; the air on her face is soft; her hair streams behind her; the stars above are as brilliant as stars in a children's book. They could be nine years old, or fifteen, or twenty-one; they've ridden bikes down Dune Drive at all of those ages and all of the ones in between. There must have been so much more to those summers, but what she remembers are the two weeks she spent in Avalon with Dani and Vanessa - two weeks that always went by too quickly, but that in memory stretch to fill an entire season. — Meg Donohue

Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything. — Aldous Huxley

I also don't think that parents should pay for their children's graduate or law school. Helping a student with a four-year bachelor's degree is very generous, but an advanced degree should be considered a personal responsibility. That will ensure that the coursework is taken very seriously and makes the young person take ownership of their degree. and when they graduate, it's a shared accomplishment that the whole family can be proud of. But do not encourage graduate school just for graduate school's sake. Work experience is much more valuable if the decision come down to that. — Dana Perino

To make possible the subjection of eternal, spiritual organized intelligences to perishable, material structures, certain natural laws would naturally be brought into operation. From the point of view of the eternal spirit, it might mean the breaking of a law directed towards eternal life; yet to secure the desired contact with matter, the spirit was compelled to violate the law. Thus, in this earth life, a man who desires to acquire a first hand acquaintance with magnetism and electricity, may subject himself to all kinds of electric shocks, that, perhaps, will affect his body injuriously; yet, for the sake of securing the experience, he may be willing to do it. Adam, the first man, so used natural laws that his eternal, spiritual body became clothed upon with an earthly body, subject to death. Then in begetting children, he was able to produce earthly bodies for the waiting spirits. According — John Andreas Widtsoe

When we give children advice or instant solutions, we deprive them of the experience that comes from wrestling with their own problems. — Adele Faber

I have three goddaughters - I'm not sure why they trust me, because I have no experience with children - but I try. — Diane Kruger

Think of each wound as you would of a child who has been hurt by a friend. As long as that child is ranting and raving, trying to get back at the friend, one wound leads to another. But when the child can experience the consoling embrace of a parent, she or he can live through the pain, return to the friend, forgive, and build up a new relationship. Be gentle with yourself, and let your heart be your loving parent as you live your wounds through. — Henri Nouwen

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded. — Alice Miller

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience ... — Thomas Hardy

Breastfeeding does not have to be hard. Breastfeeding is natural. With rare exceptions, it becomes hard only because of all the interference caused by the medicalization of birth and unsupportive culture. Animals breastfeed instinctively with no need for supplementation, classes, or support. We as humans also have these instincts. We have become so disconnected. Breastfeeding my children has been one of my greatest joys in life, and I am filled with sorrow when I imagine how many mothers and infants haven't been able to experience this because of misinformation. — Adrienne Carmack

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; 18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God — Anonymous

When we experience moments of ecstasy-in play, in art, in sex-they come not as an exception, an accident, but as a taste of what life is meant to be ... Ecstasy is an idea, a goal, but it can be the expectation of every day. Those times when we're grounded in our body, pure in our heart, clear in our mind, rooted in our soul, and suffused with the energy, the spirit of life, are our birthright. It's really not that hard to stop and luxuriate in the joy and wonder of being. Children do it all the time. It's a natural human gift that should be at the heart of our lives. — Gabrielle Roth

When did we ever get this notion that our elders have little to offer society? The years of practical experience, the knowledge of past events for first-hand historical accounts, and the wisdom for dealing with problems they faced before us have given the elderly the role of Wise One or Sage in most cultures around the world. But in our self-centered, individualistic, now-oriented culture, we can leave our debts from the past in a nursing home and our debts for the future to our children. — Michael S. Horton

You spend all this time, as a child, coming up with these fantasy stories, and here I am, sleeping in a treehouse, in the middle of Canyon de Chelly, shooting a Western. That's a bit of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. — James Badge Dale

To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children. — Oswald Chambers

In matters concerning religion, I consider myself not a child but an adult with 35 years of experience. — Mahatma Gandhi

The actor Richard Burton once wrote an article for the New York Times about his experience playing the role of Winston Churchill in a television drama:
"In the course of preparing myself ... I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history ... What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, 'We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth? Such simple
minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single
minded and merciless ferocity."
— Richard Francis Burton

Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child's very gifts (his great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness - and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. — Alice Miller

Love for a dog during childhood is one of the deepest and purest emotions we are ever likely to have, and it remains with us for the rest of our lives. For some people, their first experience with love is with a dog. The fact that the dog returns the love so fiercely, so openly, so unambivalently, is for many children a unique and lasting experience. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

A certain bygone philosophy-which certainly must have quite forgotten all about the real child-used to speak of the child's nature as a tabula rasa, or 'blank page,' upon which experience and training might write what they pleased. As a matter of fact, the child's nature at birth, like that of a calf or a chick, is pretty well scribbled over by the experience of its ancestors. It is far from being blank, for as soon as the little organism comes into the world, it begins to do certain things and do them with much zeal and determination, as every one knows who knows real children. — Edward O. Sisson

What you felt, the beast that swallowed you all and spat you back out, that is the great big bloody point of all this. If you learn nothing else from this bizarre and awkward experience--this gathering of strangers to blow into horns and pluck catgut--remember that you have the power to feel that. The power to create that. With your hands. Your breath. You are gods, children, and you can make war. — Kate Racculia

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don't simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don't know. — M.J. Rose

I have great faith in 'ordinary parents.' Who has a child's welfare more at heart than his ordinary parent? It's been my experience that when parents are given the skills to be more helpful, not only are they able to use these skills, but they infuse them with a warmth and a style that is uniquely their own. — Haim Ginott

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be-both in their youth and in adulthood-intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience. — Alice Miller

Both Cohen and Fierst told me that many parents at Riverdale, while pushing their children to excel, inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As Fierst put it, "Our kids don't put up with a lot of suffering. They don't have a threshold for it. They're protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that's where learning happens. — Paul Tough

When I think of happiness or joy in this life, I begin with some experiences that are simple and basic. I see the expression on the face of a one-year-old taking those first steps. I think of a child loving a puppy or a kitten. If the more mature have not dulled their physical or spiritual sensitivities by excess or disuse, they can also experience joy in what is simple and basic. — Dallin H. Oaks

Jesus was overcome by the experience and wept. Only one who has looked deeply into the eyes of little children can grasp why. Only one who has sensed how near little children are to the heavens, how close to the angels, how innocent and worthy of our respect, admiration, and awe can know why the Purest of the Pure wept as he associated with the purest among the Nephites. — Robert L. Millet

My journey started with the understanding that poor parents share the universal desire for education for their children. No family in our experience has ever turned down educational support for their daughter. — Ann Cotton

When we are children, we have a tranquil acceptance of mystery which is driven out of us later on, by curiosity and education and experience. But it is possible to find one's way back. With affection and respect, I disagree totally with Penelope Lively's conviction about the 'absolute impossibility of recovering a child's vision.' There _are_ ways, imperfect, partial, fleeting, of looking again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have. Children are not different animals. They are us, not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time. — Susan Cooper

The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience. — Fanny Kemble

There is nothing that anyone can get past a forty-five-year-old woman." We laugh hard, the first honest sound I make that afternoon, or in many days, each of us feeling the ravages of experience, our debt to enduring. We are not to be fucked with. We rule. Even as we age and help our children push past us, as we worry about the estimate for the roof, forget things we meant to do, regard our widening bodies, we rule. We've returned again and again to our original selves for another look; we have refined our purpose. Changes we thought we'd been resisting have anyway been wrought, and they have made us unbreakable. — Susanna Sonnenberg

We put our children through their paces in school not so that they will learn something, or master something, or meet any standards. No. We give them tools so that they can experience the joy, the passion, of creating. All we are doing is saying, "Here, if you know this, there is more you can make; there is another path you can map; there is another song you can compose." School - from pre-K to postdoc programs - exists so that we can all build more from within ourselves and with our colleagues. — Marc Aronson

As Anna Freud remarked, the toddler who wanders off into some other aisle, feels lost, and screams anxiously for his mother neversays "I got lost," but accusingly says "You lost me!" It is a rare mother who agrees that she lost him! she expects her child to stay with her; in her experience it is the child who has lost track of the mother, while in the child's experience it is the mother who has lost track of him. Each view is entirely correct from the perspective of the individual who holds it . — Bruno Bettelheim

I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home. — J.M. Coetzee

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) — Ross Cheit

Think of the hero's journey as perceived by Joseph Campbell. The mythical hero, usually an unlikely male, undertakes a physical journey to an unknown land. One the way, he is faced with a series of challenges that he can meet only through his superior physical strength and cunning. If he succeeds in getting through all the barriers, he wins the prize, which he can then take home for the benefit of his people.

Although this model has some application to the experience of women, it is not adequate to describe what a woman must do in order to live beyond the stultifying expectations of the culture in which she's raised. If she has small children, she can't take a trip or move to a new place, and very rarely is she called upon to beat down her opponent with force. Instead, her journey is an inner one where the demons are her demons of the self. Her task as the heroine is to return from her inner journey and share her knowledge, wisdom, and energy with the people around her. — Helen LaKelly Hunt

Raising children who are hopeful and who have the courage to be vulnerable means stepping back and letting them experience disappointment, deal with conflict, learn how to assert themselves, and have the opportunity to fail. If we're always following our children into the arena, hushing the critics, and assuring their victory, they'll never learn that they have the ability to dare greatly on their own. — Brene Brown

The Passion of Christ was an experience which included in itself every experience except sin, of every member of the human race. If one may say this with reverence, the fourteen incidents of the Stations of the Cross show not only the suffering but the Psychology of Christ. Above all, they show, in detail, his way of transforming suffering by love. He shows us, step by step, how that plan of love can be carried out by men, women, and children today, both alone in the loneliness of their individual lives and together in communion with one another. — Caryll Houselander

The average American child sees 20,000 murders in TV before reaching age 18. This is considered normal. Every community has video rental stores filled with multimillion-dollar films that depict people doing terrible things to each other. If you read newspapers, you have every right to believe that Bad Nasty Things compose 90 percent of the human experience. But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul. — Rob Brezsny

The observer self, a part of who we really are, is that part of us that is watching both our false self and our True Self. We might say that it even watches us when we watch. It is our Consciousness, it is the core experience of our Child Within. It thus cannot be watched - at least by anything or any being that we know of on this earth. It transcends our five senses, our co-dependent self and all other lower, though necessary parts, of us.
Adult children may confuse their observer self with a kind of defense they may have used to avoid their Real Self and all of its feelings. One might call this defense "false observer self" since its awareness is clouded. It is unfocused as it "spaces" or "numbs out." It denies and distorts our Child Within, and is often judgmental. — Charles L. Whitfield

I had such a close relationship with my dog, and my dog so filled the need in my life to have children that I just wanted Cathy to have that experience. — Cathy Guisewite

I am certainly vulnerable when I sit down with parents who have lost their children to gun violence. The emotion that they experience is so foreign to me that I find it very hard to say the right things. — Michael Skolnik

There is no experience like having children.' That's all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children. — Mitch Albom

I urge you children to be patient with your parents. If they seem to be out of touch on such vital issues as dating, clothing styles, modern music, and use of family cars, listen to them anyway. They have the experience that you lack. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Each child with special needs such as this does not come into the world in order to make our lives difficult and make us suffer. They each come into this world for a reason and have their secret inner voice. It remains to us to offer our love; to 'bear one another's burdens'; to experience a collective humbling - to realize, that is, that we are not as powerful and important as we think; and to try to lighten that person's burden and understand their language. These children are better at speaking the language of God. — Metropolitan Nikolaos Of Mesogaia

While we believe we hold the power to raise our children, the reality is that our children hold the power to raise us into the parents they need us to become. For this reason, the parenting experience isn't one of parent versus child but of parent with child. — Anonymous

Reading to younger children has come to be more or less an accepted thing, but reading to older children or to a family group is done less today with all the other attractions taking the time. Reading to a group provides a unity, a cohesion, that is wonderful. It is common bond of interest. It brings up plenty of things for family talk and discussion. A child who has been read to shows results in his speech and wider experience with languages. And definitely, if the reading is of good books, it is the beginning of good taste in literature. — Phyllis R. Fenner

Tell me, have you been blessed, and I use the term advisedly, with progeny?'
'Children?'
'Yes.'
'I have-'
'Don't. At our age they're not worth it.'
'I-'
'I'm talking from experience.'
'I don't doubt it,' says Poppy.
'Stone foetuses, all of them.'
And Poppy, astonished, seems to know what this strange woman is talking about. It's what she has too. A fossil of grief that will never go away.
Yes, thinks Ava in return, she knows what I'm on about. We can read each other's mind. — Mark O'Flynn

An actor said recently that, unless you're a parent, you shouldn't play a parent in a film. I don't know who said it, but I disagree. I understand that maybe there are aspects that you don't understand, or maybe this actor or actress had a really strong recent experience with having their first or second or third born child. I don't know. As a dad, I get that. I get that there is no love like it. But, at the same time, love is love. — Colin Farrell

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience ... — George Gissing

It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often. — Amy Bloom

Doctors would only prescribe birth control in the most dire of circumstances, and even then, what form of birth control would they prescribe? There were no reliable options, except perhaps the condom. But condoms depended on the cooperation of men, and Sanger's experience in the tenements of New York City told her that men didn't mind six or seven children so long as they were able to enjoy sex when the mood struck them. Women were the ones dealing most with the consequences of sex, not only because they were the ones getting pregnant but also because they were the ones raising the children. — Jonathan Eig

Where do I come from?
We are the children of the Great Explosion of Love that begot the whole Universe. We bear a common lineage that unites us in its interminable matrix, that is manifested in all of the different and infinite dimensions, allowing us to participate in this unending co-creation with an attitude of loving co-responsibility.
Who am I?
I am a being of light (Love), with innumerable dimensional manifestations of shadings of Love and Life. The transitory experience within matter, time and space (human being) resides in those manifestations. This allows me the use of my free will in a co-responsible way in the co-creative process of life. — Ivan Figueroa-Otero

One of the reasons we experience so much difficulty with our gifts is that parents have thought their chief function in life is to be feeding, clothing and educating the young. However, their really important ministry is to listen to their children and enable them to uncover the special blueprint that is theirs. — Elizabeth O'Connor

Suppose that you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying 'kitty' each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience. — Ralph P. Boas Jr.

Motherless mothers with a history of caretaking experience, usually for sick mothers or younger siblings when they were still children themselves, said that the round-the-clock nature of infant and toddler care sometimes brought up familiar emotions from the past. — Hope Edelman

As adults we choose our own reading material. Depending on our moods and needs we might read the newspaper, a blockbuster novel, an academic article, a women's magazine, a comic, a children's book, or the latest book that just about everyone is reading. No one chastises us for our choice. No one says, 'That's too short for you to read.' No one says, 'That's too easy for you, put it back.' No one says 'You couldn't read that if you tried
it's much too difficult.'
Yet if we take a peek into classrooms, libraries, and bookshops we will notice that children's choices are often mocked, censured, and denied as valid by idiotic, interfering teachers, librarians, and parents. Choice is a personal matter that changes with experience, changes with mood, and changes with need. We should let it be. — Mem Fox

There are 4 types of relationships. We generally know people who guide and help us like a parent or teacher; those who need our wisdom or help like a child or student; people with similar knowledge and experience on our life path who want to offer unconditional support; and those who do not wish to support us. — John Friend

It's the children who never played with fire that get burnt. — Marty Rubin

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders ... — Stuart Archer Cohen

Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain-they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter. With an average life expectancy of 78.2 years in the US (subtracting eight hours a day for sleep), I have around 250,00 conscious hours remaining to me in which I could be smiling or scowling, rejoicing in my life, in this race, in this story, or moaning and complaining about my troubles. I can be giving my fingers, my back, my mind, my words, my breaths, to my wife and my children and my neighbors, or I can grasp after the vapor and the vanity for myself, dragging my feet, afraid to die and therefore afraid to live. And, like Adam, I will still die in the end. — N.D. Wilson

Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not. — Andrew Pettegree

The undisciplined child enters into discipline by working in the company of others; not being told he is naughty." "Discipline is, therefore, primarily a learning experience and less a punitive experience if appropriately dealt with. — Maria Montessori

Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the adult ... Every lived moment has an eternal significance and already constitutes a fulfilled life. For fulfilled life is not measured by the number of years that have been lived through, or spent in one way or another. It is measured according to the depth of lived experience. — Jurgen Moltmann

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better. — Zadie Smith

Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without children ... And when researchers bother to ask questions of a more existential nature, they find that parents report greater feelings of meaning and reward
which to many parents is what the entire shebang is about. — Jennifer Senior

We simply don't have the luxury of playing nice with prayer. Not if we want things to change. Not if we want to be free - from whatever's keeping us held down and held back. Not if we want our hearts whole and thriving and deep and grounded . . . different. Not if we want to reach our destinies and experience God's promises. Not if we want our husbands and children living out what God has called them to do and be and become. Not if we want a fence of God's protection around us. Not if we want to bear the unmistakable mark of His favor upon us. Not if we want the devil and his plans to go back to the hell where they came from. — Priscilla Shirer

A lot of parents today are terrified that something they say to their children might make them 'feel bad.' But, hey, if they've done something wrong, they should feel bad. Kids with a sense of responsibility, not entitlement, who know when to experience gratitude and humility, will be better at navigating the social shoals of college. — Amy Chua

The man's rights and the woman's rights are the same size. They have the right to have their opinions and desires respected, to have a 50 percent say in decision making, to live free from verbal abuse and physical harm. Their children's rights are somewhat smaller but substantial nonetheless; children can't have an equal say in decisions because of their limited knowledge and experience, but they do have the right to live free from abuse and fear, to be treated with respect, and to have their voices heard on all issues that concern them. — Lundy Bancroft

The literature of childhood abounds with evidence that the peaks of a child's experience are not visits to the cinema, or even family outings to the sea, but occasions when he escapes into places that are disused and overgrown and silent. To a child there is more joy in a rubbish tip than a flowery rockery, in a fallen tree than a piece of statuary, in a muddy track than a gravel path. — Iona Opie

Young men, terminate, I beseech you, in your own experience, the sad divorce which has too often existed between intellect and piety. Take your stand, unswerving, heroic, by the altar of truth; and from that altar let neither sophistry nor ridicule expel you. Let your faith rest with a child's trust, with a martyr's grip, upon the truth as it is in Jesus. — William Morley Punshon

No one is born with prejudicial feelings, they are developed and nurtured within us by our experiences and upbringing. Consider the many factors involved: Babies are born into rich families and poor families alike - each capable of developing resentment toward the other. Children will often adopt prejudicial attitudes from their parents' racist remarks and actions. There are always two sides of the train tracks, with people on each side often unwilling to cross. One negative experience with a person may lead to false stereotyping for an entire people group. — Dudley C. Rutherford

Because whether through our whole lives, or through decades at the beginning of them
and, often, at the end of them, after divorces or deaths
it's our friends who move us into new homes, friends with whom we buy and care for pets, friends with whom we mourn death and experience illness, friends alongside who some of us may raise children and see them into adulthood. There aren't any ceremonies to make this official. There aren't weddings; there aren't health benefits or domestic partnerships or familial recognition. — Rebecca Traister

Fame never interested me. I could have exhibited more of my own works in the 1970s, but I didn't want to. It's sort of like being a child. When you're finished with school, you have only one thing on your mind: to get out and experience life. Did I want to spend all my time working on a painting? No, I wanted to have fun, travel, meet women and live life. — Wolfgang Beltracchi

How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.
I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was. — Laurie Colwin

Easy thing for a spirit to get used to. It is very confining, very limiting. So the child will cry out at suddenly being so limited. Hear this cry. Understand it. And give your children as much of a sense of "unlimitedness" as you possibly can. Next, introduce them to the world you have created with gentleness and care. Be full of care - that is to say, be careful - of what you put into their memory storage units. Children remember everything they see, everything they experience. Why do you spank your children the moment they exit the womb? Do you really imagine this is the only way to get their engines going? Why do you take your babies away from their mothers minutes after they have been separated from the only life-form they have known in all of their present existence? Will not the measuring and the weighing and the prodding and the poking wait for just a moment while the newly born experience the safety and the comfort of that which — Neale Donald Walsch

I've had a great deal of experience with adolescents over the centuries, and I've discovered that as a group these awkward half children take themselves far too seriously. Moreover, appearance is everything for the adolescent. I suppose it's a form of play-acting. The adolescent knows that the child is lurking under the surface, but he'd sooner die than let it out, and I was no different. I was so intent on being "grown-up" that I simply couldn't relax and enjoy life.
Most people go through this stage and outgrow it. Many, however, do not. The pose becomes more important than reality, and these poor creatures become hollow people, forever striving to fit themselves into an impossible mold. — David Eddings

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter ... will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. — Lewis Strauss

As we educate a child
removing out of its path those obstacles over which we ourselves, in early days, have stumbled, and strengthening its mind with the aid of our own matured experience
we, as it were, construct a new and better replica of ourselves, and thus enable the race to move slowly, but surely, forward towards the ultimate goal of existence
towards perfection. — Leonid Andreyev

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you. — Nicolas Cage

This is the message of your life and my life - it's that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children - nothing lasts. To the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life. Everything is this act of embracing the present moment, the felt presence of experience, and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience. It's literally psychological nomadism is what it is. — Terence McKenna

Tommy and I put on a radio play to entertain everyone while they unpacked their cookies. It was about a girl who saves up money for a prom dress, but at the last minute she says, "It's only clothes," and buys war bonds instead. The play was a big success, and my whole school pledged to buy war bonds, which should have made me happy. But it gave me a queer feeling; it's easy to write propaganda when everyone agrees with you. Do you understand? I think I'd rather bake cookies; it feels more honest.
Your friend,
Lulu


Sammy looked down at me. "A girl after your own heart!" he said. "In my experience it is a rare female who can say, 'It's only clothes,' and when the war came, you discovered who you really were. Women changed. Children grew up overnight. I wonder what happened to this one. — Ruth Reichl

People don't realize how much the food industry has infiltrated all aspects of our children's lived experience, including their experience at school. There are sponsored curricula by food companies, they're also in our schools with logos sponsoring sports teams. — Anna Lappe

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics. — Mary McCarthy

Apart from this ultimate hope, the created world would be a dungeon of despair for God's children. But faith animates our lives with an eschatological anticipation of the presence and glory of Christ. We will not find our full and permanent happiness here. Nor will we find Christian joy automatically, like a daily newspaper at the door. God intends for us to find joy kinetically, in action, as we work out our faith with fear and trembling, as we fight the good fight of faith, as we worship, fellowship, and engage in all the various dynamics of the Christian life together.62 But even in this, our hope of eternal joy sobers our expectations for the joy we can expect to experience in this life. — Tony Reinke

Do not think, because you experience adversity, that the hand of the Lord is shortened. It is not our prosperity but our holiness that he seeks with all his heart. And to that end, he rules the whole world...He is a big God for little people, and we have great cause to rejoice that, unbeknownst to them, all the kings and presidents and premiers and chancellors of the world follow the sovereign decrees of our Father in heaven, that we, the children, might be conformed to the image of his Son, Jesus Christ. — John Piper

In my experience, there are plenty of bad middle-class parents: those who put their own lives and careers before those of their children and make precious little time available for their offspring, preferring instead to hire in childcare and shower them with the latest and most expensive gadgets. — Martin Jacques

Put aside any notion you might have that low-income people live lives of ease and pleasure and that it is high-income people who suffer angst and anxiety. Studies of happiness show that people who experience less power on a daily basis, or who are in low-power positions within a social group, or who live in poorer neighborhoods, are less happy than those with more power. These findings are true of adults as well as of children. — Dacher Keltner

JUST LISTEN
When your mind is quiet and you listen closely, you will hear the children weeping silently. If you can't quite hear their cries, then listen with your eyes. These are the children of the streets, who have learned pain and suffering before they ever had a chance to experience life. Do not ignore their cries for help, for all they wish is that you will rescue them. They do not have a family that wants them, they don't know how it feels to be loved and they've never lived anywhere that felt like home ... the streets are where they find their voice and relief from all of the suffering.
Just listen and you'll see them. — Paige Dearth

An older child, one who possesses a conscience, will be troubled with self-reproaches and feelings of shame for his naughtiness, even if he is not discovered. But our two-year-olds and our three-year- olds experience guilt feelings only when they feel or anticipate disapproval from the outside. In doing this, they have taken the first steps toward the goal of conscience, but there is a long way ahead before the policeman outside becomes the policeman inside. — Selma Fraiberg

Growing up in a religious environment, children learn what not to do sexually. They learn that some practices or ideas, such as homosexuality, lust, masturbation, and pornography are sinful. These ideas are embedded in the minds of children years before they are ready for marriage, so it's no surprise that many religious people have little or no experience with sex and know little about their sexuality.
The guilt cycle that results from this training creates a form of self-censorship. Because so many sex acts and ideas are liable to lead to eternal damnation, people have a strong incentive to avoid expressing or discussing secretly held ideas and interests. Fear leads to hidden thoughts and activities and prevents normal, appropriately channeled sexual expression. — Darrel Ray

For women of a certain age, how do you meet a guy, fall in love, and decide he's the right man to have children with? Your clock's ticking, you're looking at him, and it's a crazy, pressure-filled experience. — Marcia Cross

Besides, what best prepares children to deal with the challenges of the "real world" is to experience success and joy. People don't get better at coping with unhappiness because they were deliberately made unhappy when they were young. — Alfie Kohn

If any feel that as psychiatrists directing a hospital for alcoholics we appear somewhat sentimental, let them stand with us a while on the firing line, see the tragedies, the despairing wives, the little children; let the solving of these problems become a part of their daily work, and even of their sleeping moments, and the most cynical will not wonder that we have accepted and encouraged this movement. We feel, after years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them. — William Duncan Silkworth

There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.
I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.
They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable. — Lynda Barry

A few minutes after they left, Harold bought the blanket from his bed, surrounded himself with his stuffed-toy animals, and built a fort out of them. Children project souls into their favorite stuffed animals and commune with them in the way adults commune with religious icons. Years later he would remember a happy childhood, but it was interwoven with painful separations, confusions, misapprehensions, traumas, and mysteries. This is why all biographies are inadequate; they can never capture the inner currents. This is why self knowledge is limited. Only a few remarkable people can sense the way early experience has built models in the brain. Later in life we build fictions and theories to paper over the mystery of what is happening deep inside, but in childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force. — David Brooks

A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience. — Joan Aiken

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience. — Ralph Waldo Emerson