Paulo Freire Quotes

Childhood lasts all through life.

I find children inspiring. The way they look at the world. The magical world they live in, to me, is inspiring.

I had a teacher in Paris, who said that if an actor forgot what it's like to play as a child he shouldn't be an actor. I've always loved being with children. It's marvellous to see the fresh ways they see the world. Watching them look at a tree or a river helps you to understand something that's very important.

I always love writing about children.

I've always felt like a kid, and I still feel like a kid, and I've never had any problem tapping into my childhood, and my kid side.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

One of the most responsible things you can do as an adult is to become more of a child.

Love is a naked child: do you think he has pockets for money?

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

Children offer the finest expressions of openness and flexibility. They play and laugh freely, and find wonder in the smallest things.

What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you're so wrecked it's hard to believe you ever were a child?

Walt Disney, of all people, did a good job of describing his own netony. "People who have worked with me say I am 'innocence in action,'" he wrote. "They say I have the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. Maybe I have. I still look at the world with uncontaminated wonder."

If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little child could understand — nature; and do what a little child could do — love.

If I had influence with the good fairy... I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

I hope there's always at least a small part of me that's always surprised, always taken aback, always childlike or innocent.

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Children are the closest we have to wisdom and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

Children know something that most people have forgotten.

In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.

I'm still very much a kid inside myself.

I've never outgrown my childhood.

There is a child inside me that wants to come out and do something to surprise all the adults.

You can be childlike without being childish. A child always wants to have fun. Ask yourself, 'Am I having fun?'