Quotes About Childhood

When I was a girl my mother said I chattered like a magpie even in my sleep, as if I knew one day the words would all be stopped, wine corked up in a bottle.

If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger.

Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.

When the children on a holiday have already finished playing all the games before noon and now impatiently say, "is there no one who can think of a new game?," does this show then that these children are more developed and precocious than the children in the same or a previous generation who could make the familiar games last for the whole day? Or does it not rather show that these first children lack what I would call the endearing earnestness that belongs to play?

At that time I was still in that childlike state where life consists of single, unrelated experiences.

Always a specifically qualified object is either desired or met with resistance, and this reaction always follows the pattern established in earliest childhood through the relation to father and mother. What comes from the subject is essentially a blind striving after pleasure; but this striving always acquires its quality from specific objects.

This recognition, that one must give up the retrospective longing which only wants to resuscitate the torpid bliss and effortlessness of childhood, before the "heavenly ones" wrench the sacrifice from us (and with it the entire man), came too late to the poet.

Consciousness did not exist from the beginning, and in every child it has to be built up anew in the first years of life. Consciousness is very weak in this formative period, and history shows us that the same is true of mankind—the unconscious easily seizes power.

When the neurotic complains that the world does not understand him, he is telling us in a word that he wants his mother.

The instinctual impulse that was trying to rouse the dreamer from the sleep of childhood was opposed by a personal pride that was distinctly out of place, and also, one must suppose, by a correspondingly narrow moral horizon, so that there was nothing to help her understand the spiritual content of the symbols.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work.

Though it is a misfortune for a child to have no parents, it is equally dangerous for him to be too closely bound to his family. An excessively strong attachment to the parents is a severe handicap in his later adaptation to the world, for a growing human being is not destined to remain forever the child of his parents.

A child, as I have said, possesses a sense of completeness, but only before the initial emergence of his ego-consciousness. In the case of an adult, a sense of completeness is achieved through a union of the consciousness with the unconscious contents of the mind. Out of this union arises what Jung called "the transcendent function of the psyche," by which a man can achieve his highest goal: the full realization of the potential of his individual Self.

he had preferred it to heaven because at that age Joe didn't think there could be trout streams in the clouds.

Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.

There were many causes of his unhappiness, but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled.

Do you know,' he said quietly. 'I think a baby's hand is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Rilla," Raoul said, and at the sound of my childhood nickname, my heart gave a pang. "Don't I have the right to claim what is mine?" "Of course you do," I said..."But surely not at any cost.

One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.

Not that we didn't have close relationships with our parents - I'm very close to my mom - but parents didn't think anything of going off for a few weeks and leaving their kids.

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life.

But Erin let it slide. The child was only four years old; she had a whole lifetime to learn about sadness. Today was for Dalmatians, ice cream and new dolls.

We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.