Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

I am often accused of being childish. I prefer to interpret that as child-like. I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things. I tend to exaggerate and fantasize and embellish. I still listen to instinctual urges. I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. I never water my garden without soaking myself. It has been after such times of joy that I have achieved my greatest creativity and produced my best work.

Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.

We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death

To a young heart everything is fun.

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

Learn to get excited like a child. There is nothing that has more magic than childish excitement.

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?

It has that thing - the imagination, and the feeling of happy excitement- I knew when I was a kid.

Something of the child's pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.

The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.

I remember the first time I saw him. He was 13 and just floated over the ground like a cockier spaniel chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind.

I love the energy of children. It makes me feel young. I'm just drawn to them. They're like magic to me. And they're drawn to me, the childlike part of me that never did grow up.

I think all Geminis are kids at heart. And that's why they're able to simplify some of the most complex things and connect with people. It's having that kid spirit.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout and hands full of flowers.

When I go to Florida for Christmas I always take my nieces and nephews out on excursions, ... I become like a big kid again. We go on all the big rides at the theme parks or I stick them in go-karts where their feet can't quite reach the pedals. I think that if you can continue to have the child at heart you may grow old physically but you will stay young mentally.

There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child's face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory.

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.

The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.

I long to be in the midst of the children, and have more pleasure in their little follies than in the wisdom of the wise.

If you ever want to see heaven, watch a bunch of young girls play. They are all sweat and skinned knees. Energy and open faces.

...and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.