To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.
Interpretation
Imposing one's own ideals onto others, especially children, is detrimental and leads to conflict.
This quote reflects on the destructive nature of trying to mold children in the image of the parent or guardian. It suggests that when individuals project their own flawed perceptions or ideals onto others, especially those vulnerable like children, it results in resentment and a lack of authentic connection, as both parties recognize the futility and harm in replicating a flawed image.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on parenting styles at a workshop.
I always have a high regard for the individual and have an insuperable distaste for violence and clubmanship. All these motives made me into a passionate pacifist and anti-militarist. I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.
Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.
Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.
We have to stop thinking of criminals as 'them' and admit to ourselves, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology
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