Innocent Perception Quotes

Every child who is born is the universe looking at itself with fresh eyes.

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

When I was a really young child, I felt like I could see fairies. I was convinced there were fairies in my grandmother's garden.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

The other day, when my 4-year-old saw a flowering tree and said, "Daddy, it's raining petals," that was poetry that just melted my heart into a mushy, yummy Fudgsicle.

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.

Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world…Try walking around with a child who’s going, ‘Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!’ And the child points, and you look, and you see, and you start going, ‘Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!’ I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world – present and in awe.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stas were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust.

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 childhood scenes [ in The Tree of Life] are tremendous. My favorite moment is when the mother levitate - for three seconds. Of course, this is how a child thinks of his mother.

God's deepest secrets often miss the wise and prudent and are revealed unto babes. We say, "Children, be like your parents." Jesus said, "Parents, be like your children."

As children, our imaginations are vibrant, and our hearts are open... Everything amazes us, and we think anything is possible. We continuously experience life with a sense of newness and unbridled curiosity.

As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.

It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.

"Body am I, and soul" - so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.

I recommend it to all people: Get down on the floor and look at the world from where the child looks at it.

I can’t imagine it now, but I must’ve been innocent at some time in my life. A baby don’t just get itself born bad, do it?

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."

Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

Thus, from admiration of one wise and innocent child, and from a misheard remark, the process that not even Aristotle could codify was triggered. Where do you get your ideas? I purposely mishear things.