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.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.
The first task in teaching is to bring to consciousness what the students already believe by virtue of their personal experiences about themselves and society.
I read an hour almost every night. It's part of falling asleep.
I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby.
Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.
The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.
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