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Teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
—Anonymous

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I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
—e. e. cummings

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There exists in our world an unusual, partly savage tribe, ancient and widely distributed, yet until recently little studied by anthropologists or historians. All of us were at one time members of this tribe: we knew its customs, manners, and rituals, its folklore and sacred texts. I refer, of course, to children.
—Alison Lurie

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Every now and then, go away, take a little relaxation, because when you come back to your work, your judgment will be surer. To remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment. Go some distance away, because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.
—Leonardo da Vinci

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A seven-year-old boy, in the middle of a play-therapy session, cried out spontaneously, “Oh, every child just once in his life should have a chance to spill out all over without a ‘Don't you dare! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!'" This was his way of defining his play therapy experience at that moment.

An eight-year-old girl suddenly stopped her play and exclaimed, "In here I turn myself inside out and give myself a shake, shake, shake, and finally I get glad all over that I am me."
—Virginia M. Axline

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How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

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But the adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom. When the Tao Te Ching and other wise books say things like, “Return to the beginning; become a child again,” that’s what they’re referring to. Why do the enlightened seem filled with light and happiness, like children? Why do they sometimes even look and talk like children? Because they are. The wise are Children Who Know.
—Benjamin Hoff

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My family is always hugging a whole lot, and I'm for hugging. I grew up here around men who weren't afraid to touch each other. When I was a boy, older men were always touching me and patting me. I was pretty skinny and they'd squeeze my leg and say, “Boy, does your leg swell up like that every summer?” There was a great goodness and good-heartedness in that and no meanness at all.
—Wendell Berry

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.
—Groucho Marx

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Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.
—William Stafford

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I went first of all to my son’s room, the seventh grade. The teacher showed me a mural, covering all the walls, depicting the life of the ancient Egyptians. It was a group project, and the teacher pointed out the part for which my son was responsible. The painting depicted a war scene: some pinkish, sleek, placid, fat, lifeless horses. These were nothing like the horses I had seen my son draw at previous times—skinny, elongated beasts, full of straining movement and savage life. I protested that these lifeless horses could not be my son’s doing.

The teacher explained that my son had not been allowed to paint his own unique horses; they were too different. Since this was a group project, uniformity was essential, so the children had all copied illustrations from a history textbook. As I turned away, appalled and only half-convinced, I spotted the tiny figure of a bird, of no know genus, scraggy, leering, menacing, and I knew that my son’s uniqueness had not been entirely mowed down in the drive for uniformity; it had burst through, however irrelevantly and illicitly. It reminded me of the mushrooms which push up a cement pavement, cracking and disrupting its even surface. I was happy to see it.
—Dorothy Lee

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We worry as though we had a thousand years to live! Let us rather strive after the gentle humor of the heart, which knows how to smile at the world.
—Nico

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It is not important that you should know what a dance means. It is only important that you should be thrilled.
—Martha Graham

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He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead.
—Albert Einstei

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Any music worth playing at all is worth playing badly.
—Ernest Newman

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Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
—Ray Bradbury

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We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human being could not be introspective any more than a terrier can, or a horse; he might (improbably) keep himself alive, but he could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

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The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company, a church, a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past. . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you . . . we are in charge of our Attitudes.
—Charles Swindoll

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Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in Nature. Nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
—Helen Keller

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As long as we have hope, we have direction, the energy to move, and the map to move by. We have a hundred alternatives, a thousand paths and an infinity of dreams. Hopeful, we are halfway to where we want to go; hopeless, we are lost forever.
—Anonymous

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I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.
—Hillel

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We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals . . . We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
—Henry Beston

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Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: THAT THE MOMENT ONE DEFINITELY COMMITS ONESELF, THEN PROVIDENCE MOVES TOO. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: ‘WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, OR DREAM YOU CAN, BEGIN IT. BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER, AND MAGIC IN IT.’
—W. H. Murray

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Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
—Nathaniel Branden

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The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious—symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.
—Ursula K. Le Guin

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Most of us die with our music still inside us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Feelin' Good
I take another sip from the bottle and I start to sway. I find it hard keeping my balance. I stumble over to the table, I'm feeling really happy now. I'm even peeing in my pants and it doesn't bother me. I laugh out loud and drink more. I notice people are pointing at me and giggling, but that's OK. I move away from the table and fall to the floor, dropping my bottle. But I get right up and grin at everyone. Why shouldn't I feel good? I'm eleven months old and I can walk!
—Arlen Grossman

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Like nearly all dogs, as well as practically all children that have not been blocked in their natural growing and expanding, Strongheart was a master of the art of living fully and completely in the here and now of things. He always made the immediate occasion and the immediate circumstance yield some kind of a dividend in interest and fun.
—J. Allen Boone

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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
—Henry James

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. . . I’ve become convinced that in a global economy characterized by ever-accelerating change, the failure to nourish and encourage lightness in the workplace not only undermines productivity, creativity, adaptability, and morale—it literally drives people crazy!
—C. W. Metcalf

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I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible;
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
—Dawna Markova

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What people really need is a good listening to.
—Mary Lou Casey

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Your dream is waiting for you to come true.
—J. Sig Paulson

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I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
—Anonymous

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At the age of four, a child I knew drew extraordinarily vibrant, imaginative trees. Crayon, chalk, colored pens, and silly putty were all useful. These trees were remarkable in how clearly they showed the bulbous lobes and branchy veins of individual leaves in a kind of cubist, all-the-way-around view that would have delighted Picasso. Meticulous observation of real trees, and a certain daring that is characteristic of four-year-olds, combined to produce these striking artworks.

By the age of six, this child had gone through a year of first grade and had begun drawing lollipop trees just like the other kids. Lollipop trees consist of a single blob of green, representing the general mass of leaves with details obliterated, stuck up on top of a brown stick, representing the tree trunk. Not the sort of place real frogs would live.
—Stephen Nachmanovitch

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I've done the research, and I hate to tell you, but everybody dies—lovers, joggers, vegetarians, and nonsmokers. I'm telling you this so that some of you who jog at 5 a.m. and eat vegetables will occasionally sleep late and have an ice cream cone.
—Bernie Siegel

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Joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God.
—Teilhard de Chardin

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Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.
—Robert Browning

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Grownups never understand anything by themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.
—Antoine de St. Exupéry

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Laughter is the sound track of having fun.
—Lawrence J. Cohen

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Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes your hopes rise to the stars. Enthusiasm is the sparkle in your eyes, the swing in your gait, the grip of your hand, the irresistible surge of will and energy to execute your ideals.
—Henry Ford

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A first-grade teacher was overseeing her students as they experimented with their desk computers. One boy sat staring at the screen, unsure how to get the computer going. The teacher walked over and read what was on his screen. In her most reassuring voice, she said, "The computer wants to know what your name is." Then she walked over to the next child. The boy leaned toward the screen and whispered, "My name is David."
—Joe Claro

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Toddler/2-Year-Old Property Laws
1. If I like it, it's mine.
2. If it's in my hand, it's mine.
3. If I can take it from you, it's mine.
4. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
6. If I'm doing or building something, ALL the pieces are mine.
7. If it looks just like mine, it IS mine.
8. If I saw it first, it's mine.
9 If you are playing with something and you put it down, it automatically becomes mine.
10. If it's broken, it's YOURS.
—Anonymous

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I think over again my small adventures,
My Fears
Those small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach,
And yet there is only one great thing
The only thing
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
—Old Inuit Song

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I never worked a day in my life. It was all fun.
—Thomas Edison

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Teachers Get Paid Too Much
I’m fed up with teachers and their hefty salary guides. What we need here is a little perspective. If I had my way, I’d pay these teachers myself —I’d pay them baby-sitting wages. That’s right — instead of paying these outrageous taxes, I’d give them $3 an hour out of my own pocket. And I’m only going to pay them for five hours, not coffee breaks. That would be $15 a day — each parent should pay $15 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their child. Even if they have more than one child, it’s still a lot cheaper than private day care. Now, how many children do they teach every day — maybe 20? That’s $15 x 20 = $300 a day. But remember, they only work 180 days a year! I’m not going to pay them for all those vacations! $300 x 180 = $54,000. (Just a minute. I think my calculator needs batteries.) I know now you teachers will say — what about those who have 10 year’s experience and a master’s degree? Well, maybe (to be fair) they could get the minimum wage, and instead of just baby-sitting, they could read the kids a story. We could round that off to about $5 an hour, times five hours, times 20 children. That’s $500 a day times 180 days. That’s $90,000 . . . Huh? Wait a minute, let’s get a little perspective here. Baby-sitting wages are too good for these teachers. Did anyone see a salary guide around here???
—Anonymous

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Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric . . .
—Edna St. Vincent Millay