What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawRead
Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that home life can be confining and unnatural, akin to a bird being trapped in a cage.
George Bernard Shaw's quote highlights the idea that what we consider the comfort of home can actually serve as a constraint, limiting our freedom and natural instincts. Just as a cockatoo might feel out of place and restricted in a cage, individuals may find the expectations and routines of home life stifling, suggesting a deeper reflection on the nature of domesticity and personal freedom.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion on the pressures of family life during a psychology seminar.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.
Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.
People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.
I'm like everyone elseβI see the world in terms of what I would like to see happen, not what actually does.
One must be a great man indeed to be able to hold out even against common sense." "Or else a fool.
Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way.
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