Fairy Tales

Aimee Stewart - Treasure Hunt

Child of the pure, unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy tale.
Lewis Carroll

When the first baby laughed for the first time,
its laugh broke into a thousand pieces,
and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.
And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy.
So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.
James M. Barrie – Peter Pan.

Fairy Tales are more than true;
not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they tell us
that dragons can be beaten.
G. K. Chesterton

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. Lewis

♥♥♥

Seekers

Robert Williams Shellseekers

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions,
preconceptions and abstractions.
Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armour of the ego.
Not until years later does an instinct come
that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.
The sun glints through the pines,
and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain,
like a memory of paradise.
After that day, we become seekers.
Peter Matthiessen

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves,
and it is tiresome for children
to be always and forever
explaining things to them.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Books 3

The most important thing we’ve learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set –
Or better still, just don’t install
The idiotic thing at all.

Wonder

The most beautiful thing we can experience
is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

If a child is to keep alive
his inborn sense of wonder,
he needs the companionship of at least
one adult who can share it,
rediscovering with him the joy,
excitement and mystery
of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson

Children

If I had my child to raise over again
I’d build self-esteem first and the house later
I’d finger paint more and point the finger less
I would do less correcting and more connecting
I’d take my eyes off my watch and watch with my eyes
I would care to know less and know to care more
I’d take more hikes and fly more kites
I’d stop playing serious and seriously play
I would run through more fields and gaze at more stars
I’d do more hugging and less tugging
I’d see the oak tree in the acorn more often
I would be firm less often and affirm much more
I’d model less about the love of power
And more about the power of love.
Diane Loomans

Know you what it is to be a child?
It is to be something very different from the man of to-day.
It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism;
it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief;
it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear;
it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness,
and nothing into everything,
for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul.
Francis Thompson

The child must know that he is a miracle,
that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been,
and until the end of the world there will not be,
another child like him.
Pablo Casals

Clouds of Glory

Trailing Clouds of Glory.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
and not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
William Wordsworth

It is not a slight thing,
when they who are fresh from God love us.
Charles Dickens