Our material eye cannot see that a stupid chauvinism is driving us from one noisy, destructive, futile agitation to another.
We are bothered a good deal by people who assume the responsibility of the world when God is neglectful.
We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.
I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.
I cannot explain it; but when difficulties arise, I am not perplexed or doubtful. I know how to meet them.
Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember.
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
We are afraid of ideas, of experimenting, of change. We shrink from thinking a problem through to a logical conclusion.
It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
The Great War proved how confused the world is. Depression is proving it again.
I'd rather break stones on the king's highway than hem a handkerchief.
It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!
Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.
No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.
If the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself.
Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy.
People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
