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"Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children."
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"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."

"While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights."

"I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one."

"A person begins childhood with a mind that is essentially a blank slate " a tabula rasa " before receiving outside impressions. Early childhood experiences and perceptions begin the formulation of a state of conscious awareness, the infantile steps in forming a personality, developing social and emotional behavior, and acquiring practical and book knowledge. Childhood plays a critical role in forming our final version of a self-concept."

"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."

"In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.A childhood that wasn't spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no wonder, seems too dull to imagine."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

"Already the ripening barberries are redAnd the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.The man who is not rich now as summer goesWill wait and wait and never be himself.The man who cannot quietly close his eyescertain that there is vision after vision inside,simply waiting for nighttimeto rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man.Nothing else will come; no more days will openand everything that does happen will cheat him.Even you, my God. And you are like a stonethat draws him daily deeper into the depths."

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty."

"Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every path.That steps into other hands,changes those that are like itinto a landscape:wanders and arrives within them,fills them with arrival."

"And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value."

"Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others."

"Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child's deathout of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves itinside its round mouth like the coreof a shining apple? Killers areeasy to grasp. But this: death,the whole of death, before life,to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,cannot be expressed."

"Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried."

"The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame."

"Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own."
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