Benjamin Rush Quotes

We best oppose error by promoting a solid knowledge of the word of truth, and the greatest kindness we can do to children, is to make them early to know the Bible.

Raising children should mean helping them to become what they already are in God’s eyes.

The first step towards attaining a higher standard of holiness is to realize more fully the amazing sinfulness of sin.

The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power-in the improvement of the world.

Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.

Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.

Over the years my mom has become a self-taught Biblical scholar.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

The child … must not learn religion before he knows morality

For the majority of mankind, religion is a habit, or, more precisely, tradition is their religion. Though it seems strange, I think that the first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way.

One of the great compliments paid the Savior was that he taught as one having authority. The missionary who knows scripture and can quote it speaks with the voice of authority...May I suggest that in our family night gatherings we make it a project to memorize one scripture a week pertinent to this work. At the conclusion of a year our children will have on their lips a fund of scripture which will remain with them throughout their lives.

It's a long haul bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing that — bring them up — and that means bringing things up with them: Asking, telling, sounding them out, sounding off yourself — finding, through experience, your own words, your own way of putting them together. You have to learn where you stand, and make sure your kids learn [where you stand], understand why, and soon, you hope, they'll be standing there beside you, with you.

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

Begin early to teach, for children begin early to sin.

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

Our intellect is not intended to be an end in itself, but only a means to the very mind of God.

Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.

The knowledge of sin is the beginning of salvation.

Children ought to be led to honorable practices by means of encouragement and reasoning, and most certainly not by blows and ill treatment.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit.

We say then, that Christianity is adapted to the intellect, because its spirit coincides with that of true philosophy; because it removes the incubus of sensuality and low vice; because of the place it gives to truth; because it demands free inquiry; because its mighty truths and systems are brought before the mind in the same way as the truths and systems of nature; because it solves higher problems than nature can; and because it is so communicated as to be adapted to every mind.

One of the ways in which parenting is a learning experience and an opportunity for moral growth is that we learn as parents that we don't choose the kind of child that we have.