The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.
The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.
Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.
From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.
Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.
The first groundwork of religious life is love--love to God and
man--in the bosom of the family.
Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man
and of humanity.
Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.
Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create
life.
Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no
union with God is possible for men.
The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the
human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not
therefore humanity born anew in each child?
In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.
The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed
human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like
one.
In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things
proceeds from one God.
Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and
joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.
What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a
beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and
lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to
verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.
This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the
beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national
order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must
first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of
freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not
even in that of the nursling.
The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.
A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,--what is it but a
true sense of our close filial union with God?
Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he
must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.
My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their
innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I
follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.
A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.
I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in
God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose
hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the
purity and peace of heaven,--God's earth and God's heaven.
[Illustration: _THE MENAGERIE._
Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland.
"What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become
by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they
expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on
every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of
their inmost souls."--_Froebel._]