A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certain ...irreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,... And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush--and that was all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you're anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man of culture rare,... You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point.... I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. America the plum blossoms are falling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We need to nurture uniqueness and independence.... Ours must be schools for ego- strength--the child's ego, not the teacher's. "Yo...u can do it!" has to be the teacher's consistent, over-and-over steady slogan: "You can hang up your own coat...." "You can pour your own juice...." "You can climb to the top...." "You can figure it out." We have no stake in schools where children learn to color within the lines. No stake in pushing for unnecessary conformity, no stake in children submerging themselves in the group, no stake in everlasting lessons in obediently following the directions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
--I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart. --It does, Mr Bloom said.... Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives. At the high noon of the British sun, s...oldiers in far-flung outposts of the Empire doctored themselves with "a spoonful o' gunpowder in a cuppa 'ot tea." Purveyors and users of harsh laxatives were not afraid of being thought mean and unfriendly just because their laxatives were. But in America, the need to be nice is so consuming that nobody would dare take a laxative that makes you run up the stairs two at a time, pushing others aside and yelling, "Get out of the way!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept... truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I remember once dreaming of pushing a canoe up the rivers of Maine, and that, when I had got so high that the channels were dry, I... kept on through the ravines and gorges, nearly as well as before, by pushing a little harder, and now it seemed to me that my dream was partially realized.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's the use of worrying? It never was worth while,... So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »