Ralph Waldo Emerson Children Quotations

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested, - "But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil.'

In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism.

The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every bystander to take his part.

The world when seen through a little child's eyes, greatly resembles paradise. Happiness is doing with a smile what you have to do anyway. This time, like all time, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.

A child convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. The reward for a thing well done, is to have done it.

If I am the devil's child, I will live then, by the devil.

Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves.

Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.

Housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host nor the guest;it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.

Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we havehad our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

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.

The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society asa child, and never allow it to dictate.

Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

You think me the child of circumstance; I make my circumstance.

It is contended that those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged: that an unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?

Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers.

The advantage in education is always with those children who slip up into life without being objects of notice.

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.

It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage ofsociety; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own.

The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.

We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.

Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.

The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child.

England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

Man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle.

Teach the children! It is painting in fresco.

Duty grows everywhere--like children, like grass.

In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide; nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.

What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

We all wish to be of importance in one way or another. The child coughs with might and main, since it has no other claim on the company.

A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveler in a very far country.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude...

Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

Children are all foreigners.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

The Oversoul is before Time, and Time, Father of all else, is one of his children.

We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.

Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike. When we see a great man, we fancy a resemblance to some historical person, and predict the sequel of his character and fortune, a result which he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the problem of his character according to our prejudice, but only in his high unprecedented way.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.

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.

We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, that we take no thought forthe morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own.

A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

We are the children of many sires, and every drop of blood in us in its turn betrays its ancestor.

Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers. Christian Bovee A little praise Goes a great ways.

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch...

As soon as a child has left the room his strewn toys become affecting.

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.

The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune.

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act.

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.

Sorrow makes us all children again.

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.