Childhood

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

There is no time like the old time, when you and I were young.

 

The Hobbits are just rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination. J. R. R.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

 

In Westphalie, in Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh’scastle, there was a young boy upon whom nature had bestowed the gentlest manners. His soul shined through his face. He had fairly sound judgment, with the simplest spirit; this is why, I believe, they called him Candide.

Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.

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

When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

How do you like to go up in a swing,

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.

Deep meaning oft lies hid in childish play.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

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.

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes.

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

In the true man there is a child concealed - who wants to play.

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

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

 

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.

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.

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

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

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.