Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each. –Plato
“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C.S. Lewis
I used to say to my auntie, ‘You throw my fu*kin’ poetry out, and you’ll regret it when I’m famous,’ and she threw the bast*rd stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fu*kin’ genius or whatever I was when I was a child. — John Lennon
I have never encountered any children in any group who are not geniuses. There is no mystery on how to teach them. The first thing you do is treat them like human beings and the second thing you do is love them.– Dr. Asa Hilliard
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. — Thomas Huxley
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. — Charles Baudelaire
All of us, you, your children, your neighbors and their children are everyday geniuses, even though the fact is unnoticed and unremembered by everyone. That’s probably because school hasn’t encouraged us to notice what’s hidden inside us waiting for the right environment to express itself. — Peter Kline
If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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 seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. — Isaac Newton
Genius is, to be sure, not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of freedom, just as wit, love, and faith, which once shall become arts and disciplines. We should demand genius from everybody, without, however, expecting it. — Friedrich Schlegel
True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of a genius.
— Puzant Kevork Thomajan
The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart. — Mencius
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. — Pablo Picasso
The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius. — Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. — Norman Podhoretz
“What is genius?- It is the power to be a boy again at will” — James Matthew Barrie
“A boy has a natural genius for combining business with pleasure” — Charles Dudley Warner
Perhaps what we sometimes call “genius” is simply a refusal to altogether let go of childhood imagination.
— Michael Cibenko
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. — Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. — Robert Fulghum
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
One Response
Matthew 18:1-3 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.