Mark Twain Quotes

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.

As the creative adult needs to toy with ideas, the child, to form his ideas, needs toys--and plenty of leisure and scope to play with them as he likes, and not just the way adults think proper. This is why he must be given this freedom for his play to be successful and truly serve him well.

Creativity is one of the most important brain functions in developing youth. It is the ultimate road to invention. I believe it is really important to both nurture and encourage this in children - and adults, too!

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

People tell you not to work with children and animals, and I chose to work with a 7-year-old and several dinosaurs!

I sometimes worry that all the beautiful things have been made.

My daughter has a vivid imagination, and so does my son.

I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.

Sometimes it's a beautiful face, sometimes it's a place. I am inspired by everything.

An educational foundation is only part of the equation. In order for creativity to flourish and imagination to take hold, we also need to expose our children to the arts from a very young age.

In the spangled sky, the rainbow, the woodland hung with diamonds, the sward sown with pearly dew, the rosy dawn, the golden clouds of even, the purple mountains, the hoary rock, the blue boundless main, Nature's simplest flower, or some fair form of laughing child or lovely maiden, we cannot see the beautiful without admiring it.

cultivate in young minds an equal love of the good, the beautiful and the absurd; most people's lives are too lead-colored to lose the smallest twinkle of light from a flash of nonsense.

One of the most beautiful things we can give our child is music education.

When we treat children's play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that's to be found in the creative spirit. We're helping ourselves stay in touch with that spirit, too. It's the things we play withand the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.

Television deprives children of their imaginations.

I hope that when children read my stories that they evoke images for children. I four stories can help children use their own imaginations and lead them to act the stories out or to embark on related research, they will learn more and learn to love reading more.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

For me, difference is beautiful, there is not only one beauty, and in a collection I always like to show mixed directions. When you look at people or things, there are all these codes and standards that come into play around what is considered ugly or beautiful, and I've always questioned that. When you're a kid, you're not conditioned, you don't see perversity, there's a state of innocence where everything is beautiful, you see differently....I am lucky because I am doing now what I dreamt of doing as a child, and I like to think that I've retained a childlike state of mind.

I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.

Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.

Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

Give children toys that are powered by their imagination, not by batteries.

As children we all wonder - we wonder all the time. And that gets lost in adulthood. It gets beaten out, it gets filtered out or diluted out.

Some people become dullards, but as children we are all creative. It's in the programming, the socialization, that we lose our sense of play.