Life and Existence

A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.

A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgeable would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgeable would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

When everything is astonishing, nothing is astonishing; this is how the world is to children.

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.

I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.