Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes About Children

• Successful is the person who has lived well, laughed often and loved much, who has gained the respect of children, who leaves the world better than they found it, who has never lacked appreciation for the earth's beauty, who never fails to look for the best in others or give the best of themselves.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Appreciation, Children, Successful

• Sorrow makes us all children again.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Grief, Condolences

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Porte (1982). “Emerson in His Journals”, p.277, Harvard University Press

• Sorrow makes us all children again -
  destroys all differences of intellect.
  The wisest know nothing.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Sad, Children, Condolences

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Porte (1982). “Emerson in His Journals”, p.277, Harvard University Press

• Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Respect, Nature, Children

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2745, Delphi Classics

• There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Love, Mom, Mother

• We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Heart, Grandparent

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.276, Penguin

• Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Children, Parenting

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2004). “A Dream Too Wild: Emerson Meditations for Every Day of the Year”, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations

• We fill the hands and nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses, withdrawing their eyes from the plain face and... Nature, the sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their toys.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Horse, Children, Eye

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Self-Reliance and Other Essays”, p.76, Courier Corporation

• A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Essentials, Routine

• Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Funny, Baby, Children

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.260, Library of America

• We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem tomeasure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented if you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Book, Arms

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2955, Delphi Classics

• A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Motivational, Baby, Children

• The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Eye, Heart

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Jean Ferguson Carr (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, addresses, and lectures”, p.9, Harvard University Press

• Spirit, that made those heroes dare
  To die, and leave their children free,
  Bid Time and Nature gently spare
  The shaft we raise to them and thee.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Uplifting, Memorial Day, Children

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Mikics (2012). “The Annotated Emerson”, p.521, Harvard University Press

• Children are all foreigners.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Motivational, Success, Children

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1969). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII: 1838-1842”, p.245, Harvard University Press

• A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Children, Attitude

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.244, Library of America

• My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Fathers Day, Children

  Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1888). “The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, L834-l872”

• In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Life, Nature, Children

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.10, Library of America

• The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Marriage, Children, Work

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.89, Courier Corporation

• Don't trust children with edge tools. Don't trust man, great God, with more power than he has until he has learned to use that little better. What a hell we should make of the world if we could do what we would!

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Power, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2014). “The Heart of Emerson's Journals”, p.55, Courier Corporation

• Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Air, Radicalism

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.334

• Cannot we let [children] be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another you. One's enough.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Father, Enjoy Life

• Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Past, Parent

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.125, Penguin

• Only to youth will spring be spring.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Children, Spring

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.237, Delphi Classics

• We stand against fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to a man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds it new and bigger.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Wall, Father

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.265, Penguin

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