Aristotle Quotes

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

Children are all more or less little monkeys in that they imitate everything they see. If their mother treats them exactly as she does her visitors they in turn play "visitor" to perfection. Nothing hurts the feelings of children more than not being allowed to behave like grown persons when they think they are able.

"The first awareness of the child comes with his ego. He becomes aware of the "I", not of the Self. Really, he becomes aware first of the "thou". The child first becomes aware of his mother. Then, reflectively, he becomes aware of himself. First he becomes aware of objects around him. Then, by and by, he begins to feel that he is separate. This feeling of separation gives the feeling of ego, and because the child first becomes aware of the ego, ego becomes a covering on the Self. "

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

The most serious point in the case is the disposition of the child." What on earth has that to do with it?" I ejaculated. My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining insight as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.

The only form of action open to a child is to break something or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause things to happen in the world.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.

Only if a child feels right can he think right.

One of our urgent opportunities is to respond to a child when he earnestly asks, remembering that they don't always ask.

One must never tell a child what it is they should display acting.

Children?have no use for psychology.

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves.

The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.

Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work.