Fritjof Capra Quotes

My parents would tell us to go outside and play or to do creative stuff, but television was very limited. So we used our own creativity to entertain ourselves. We were out in the woods a lot making huts and playing horses.

I think outdoors has been my second home. My parents wouldn't be like, "Go and do a puzzle," they'd be like, "Hey, there's a forest across the street. You need to go play in it."

One of the first houses we lived in was like out of a fairy story. We had a stream that ran through our garden, and we played with the ducks - we locked them in my mum's office, and they pooed everywhere. It was crazy, picking blackberries and mushrooms, rabbits running through your legs.

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?

We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.

When I was growing up, kids would go outside and play all day and invent things. And my brothers and I pretended our picnic table was a ship one summer. Our bikes were horses, and our trees were forts. We turned everything in the world into make-believe.

I never grew up reading or fantasizing about fairy tales. I was always too busy, like, outside being a kid.

Michael has a connection with children, just like Mickey Mouse does, and he brings happiness to them, and joy.

As a kid, I was just led out in the morning to go spend my day with my friends and just run in the woods. And I'd only come home to eat or when I was thirsty.

I was very into animals and nature, and really obsessed with cats and monkeys. I used to play in the woods, wander off into the woods for hours. I'd bring a clipboard and think that I was doing some work out there, following the trails of raccoons or collecting bird feathers.

What joy and adventure the youngsters of today are missing as they sit indoors mucking about with computer games and videos!

I grew up in the late '70s. We played outside all day. I think that's where I got the whole notion of being an actor, you know, stunt fighting with my friends.

People ask what message I have for kids, and it's simple: Just go outside.

Exposing children to nature, especially at an early age, keeps them grounded.

There were no toys or games when I was younger, just a football.

My earliest memory as a kid was when I was about six, my dad used to take me and our Labrador Glen for a walk. We used to take a wind up camera and go searching for crop circles. We'd make little notes and I'd take photos of the circles.

The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.

One significant thing that you can do for your children is to invest some time into taking them out into nature.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child.

I'm a dirty kid, I like to be outside, I like to run about, I like to get messy. So I spent a lot of time outside as a kid, skating and just being a disaster.

Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotiona l development at all ages. This is especially true of the purest form of play: the unstructured, self-motivated, imaginative, independent kind, where children initiate their own games and even invent their own rules.

Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

Play is as necessary to the perfect development of a child as sunshine is to the perfect development of a plant.

If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun.