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Children are universally seen as being pretty creative, whilst us
adults struggle to recall how we did it, all those years ago. If we can
learn from them, if we can regain their open wonder and talent, what new
ideas we could bring into the world!
See also
beginners, dreaming, education*, experience, exploration, genius, love,
openness*, play*, potential, talent, wonder
Quotes
‘This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than
fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain
that they are their own.’
— Aristotle
‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’
— Bible, Psalms 8:2
‘Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not
depart from it.’
— Proverbs, 22:6
‘I am not young enough to know everything.’
— James M. Barrie
‘Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood
how equipped for self-expression with an adult’s capacities.’
— Charles Pierre Baudelaire
‘If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the
companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the
joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.’
— Rachel Carson
‘No matter how old you get, if you keep the desire to be create, you are
keeping the man-child alive.’
— John Cassavetes
‘Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.’
— Clarence Darrow
‘Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.’
— Walt Disney
‘The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are
permitted to remain children all our lives.’
— Albert Einstein
‘To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play
and the childlike desire for recognition.’
— Albert Einstein
‘Every child is born a genius.’
— Albert Einstein
‘Maybe that is why young people make success. They don’t know enough.’
— Richard P. Feynman
‘What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the
child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.’
— Sigmund Freud
‘What are the conditions of the creative attitude, of seeing and responding,
of being aware and being sensitive to what one is aware of? First of all it
requires the capacity to be puzzled. Children still have the capacity to be
puzzled.’
— Erich Fromm
‘There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than
others.’
— Richard Buckminster Fuller
‘Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself...
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
Which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.’
— Kahlil Gibran
‘You have to ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing
but geniuses.’
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the
future in.’
— Graham Greene
‘Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.’
— Robert Heinlein
‘When I grow up I want to be a little boy.’
— Joseph Heller
‘Creativity is an area in which younger people have a tremendous advantage,
since they have an endearing habit of always questioning past wisdom and
authority.’
— Bill Hewlett
‘Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles.
The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative
individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.’
— Eric Hoffer
‘Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by
children.’
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
‘If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes
of the old, you see light.’
— Victor Hugo
‘Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shames, the clarity and ruthlessness of their
vision.’
— Aldous Huxley
‘The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.’
— Thomas Huxley
‘If there is anything we wish to change
in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something
that could better be changed in ourselves.’
— Carl Gustav Jung
‘Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their
children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their
grandchildren are once more slaves.’
— D. H. Lawrence
‘Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like
ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible.’
— R. D. Laing
‘Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to
solve.’
— Roger Lewin
‘There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a
child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions
they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.’
— John Locke
‘The important thing is not so much that every child should be
taught, as that every child should be given the wish to
learn.’
— John Lubbock
‘It wasn’t until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, "I
don’t know." ’
— W. Somerset Maugham
‘Creativity is a characteristic given to all human beings at birth.’
— Abraham Maslow
‘A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.’
— Mencius
‘A child building a sandcastle is not "working hard". It doesn’t seem to him
to be a task. It simply fills his imagination at the time ti’st going on, and
anything else is an irritant.’
— Jonathan Miller
‘The older I get, the more I marvel at the wisdom of children.’
— David Morgan
‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then
finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
— Isaac Newton
‘There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top
problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost
long ago.’
— J. Robert Oppenheimer
‘It takes a long time to grow young.’
— Pablo Picasso
‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a
child.’
— Pablo Picasso
‘If you would be more creative stay in part a child, with the creativity and
invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult
society.’
— Jean Piaget
‘Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once he grows
up.’
— Pablo Picasso
‘Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy
of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on
the disciplined adult intelligence.’
— Norman Podhoretz
‘Children reinvent your world for you.’
— Susan Sarandon
‘To retain the simple playfulness of childhood through one’s riper years is
what opens a person up to the creative possibilities within a situation.’
— Denise Shekerjian
‘Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more
powerful in the mature than in the young.’
— W. Somerset Maugham
‘Children are a wonderful gift...They have an extraordinary capacity to see
into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.’
— Desmond Tutu
‘When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood
in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its
maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any
evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity
of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.’
— Mark Twain
‘Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the
man to rediscover the child.’
— Laurens Van der Post
‘Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.’
— Edgar Varèse
‘Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then
artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.’
— Eudora Welty
‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;’
— William Wordsworth
‘The Child is father of the Man.’
— William Wordsworth
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