Only the children know what they are looking for. They waste their time over a rag doll and it becomes very important to them; and if anybody takes it away from them, they cry.
Interpretation
Children attach significant importance to their simple possessions, reflecting their innate understanding of value and connection.
This quote by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry highlights the unique perspective of children, who often invest emotional significance in seemingly trivial objects, like a rag doll. It suggests that what might appear unimportant to adults can hold immense value for a child, emphasizing the importance of emotional attachments and the complexity of human connections, regardless of age or object.
In practice
During a parenting workshop to illustrate emotional development.
Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!
Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contadictory! But I was too young to know how to love her.
When a mystery is too overpowering, one dare not disobey.
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency.
What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimey city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke.
Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day.
In the law, rights are islands of empowerment. . . . Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images, either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
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