I think babies are a bit boring, actually. They're OK when they're older; they make you laugh. I think we all think that, really - we just don't say it.
Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial.
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.
Babies don't know who's rich and who's poor. You love 'em and they're happy.
This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
I don't particularly like babies. I don't mind them for about four minutes. That's my max. After that I can't quite see what everyone's fussing about.
Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.
But trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!.
I don't dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream.
