Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.
Interpretation
Children have an intuitive and emotional understanding of nature that adults often lack.
This quote emphasizes the profound way in which children perceive the beauty and fragility of nature, particularly symbolized by the lily. While adults may provide factual information about nature and its laws, they often fail to see and appreciate the pure, unfiltered emotional connection that children have with the world around them, highlighting a gap between experiential understanding and learned information.
In practice
A teacher might share this quote during a lesson about the importance of fostering emotional intelligence in children.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
I say get an education. Become an electrician, a mechanic, a doctor, a lawyer, anything but a fighter. In this trade, it's the managers that make the money and last the longest.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.
Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids' creativity.
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