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Keep the inner child alive in you …

• One of the most responsible things you can do as an adult is to become more of a child. Wayne Dyer
• The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart. Mencius
• It’s never to late to have a happy childhood. Tony Robbins
• And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus
• It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Bruce Williamson
• Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart. Mencius (Meng-Tse)
• The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing. Ernest Hemingway
• Seek the wisdom of the ages but look at the world through the eyes of a child. Ron Wild
• There are three things that a child can teach an adult: To be happy for no reason; to be always busy doing something; And to know how to demand – with all one’s might – what one wants. Paulo Coelho
• Childhood,  Play,  Wonder,  Curiosity,  Youth,  Imagination,   Stay young at heart,  Getting older

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… for there is great genius to be unlocked in doing so

• Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. Charles Baudelaire
• Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them. Richard Buckminster Fuller
• Genius is childhood recaptured. Rene Dubos
• Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common – inquisitiveness. Edwin Bulwar-Lytton
• Genius is the recovery of childhood at will. Arthur Rimbaud
• The reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement of genius. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
• The most sophisticated people I know–inside they are all children. Jim Henson
• If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. Robert Oppenheimer
• But the adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear- minded, all- seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom. When the Tao te Ching and other wise books say things like, “Return to the beginning; become a child again” that’s what they are referring to. Why do the enlightened seem filled with light and happiness like children? Why do they sometimes even look and talk like children? Because they are. The wise are Children Who Know. Their minds have been emptied of the countless minute somethings of small learning and filled with the great wisdom of the Great Nothing, the Way of the Universe.  Benjamin Hoff
• Genius

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Through the eyes of a child you see the world as it should be

• The ability to retain a child’s view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare – and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking. Mortimer J. Adler
• All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
• The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart. Mencius
• If my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this. Kitaro Nishida
• A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle- aged habit and convention. Aldous Huxley
• A lifetime of repetitive thinking patterns have rusted the child within. When we find new ways of looking at things, we reenergize that inner child with possibility.  J. Goldwag
• Perception

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See things as if for the first time through the eyes of a child

• See the world as if for the first time; see it through the eyes of a child, and you will suddenly find that you are free. Deepak Chopra
• Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory. Betty Smith
• The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.  Eugene Ionesco
• Explore the familiar with new eyes

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Revive your sense of freshness and joy

• An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. Arnaud Desjardins
• If my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this. Kitaro Nishida
• Seek the wisdom of the ages but look at the world through the eyes of a child. Ron Wild
• The time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness. Edna O’Brien
• Joy

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Revive your creativity

• You’ve got to keep the child alive; you can’t create without it. Joni Mitchell
• The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Pablo Ruizy Picasso
• The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority. Jean Caldwell
• No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you’re keeping the man-child alive. John Cassavetes
• At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet. Seth Godin
• The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome. Tibor Kalman
• Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. Norman Podhoretz
• If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society. Jean Piaget
• A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude. Willa Cather
• Creativity

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Revive your sense of play

• Can you imagine experiencing the world as a great sandbox given for us to play in like we did as children? As we play, we can also open ourselves to the exploration of our edges, always creating new adventures of self- exploration as we let go of old out- dated beliefs about ourselves. Judith- Annette Milburn
• In the true man there is a child concealed – who wants to play. Friedrich Nietzsche
• To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition. Albert Einstein
• Deep meaning lies often in childish play. Johann Friedrich von Schiller
• In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play. Friedrich Nietzsche
• A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him. Pablo Neruda
• The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. Erik H. Erikson
• Our inner child is still in there somewhere, aching to be let loose from all the layers we’ve piled on over the years. Why not break him/her out for the day or even a moment? Be playful.  Blow some bubbles.  Skip around the block. Feel the freedom.  Take fearlessness out for a test run.  Let yourself have some fun.  Lynn Hasselberger
• Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor. Stuart Brown
• My childhood may be over, but that doesn’t mean playtime is. Ron Olson
• Play

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Revive your sense of wonder, awe and delight

• A child sees everything as wondrous. Walking the path of beauty means living moment to glorious moment, letting everything be new and exciting again. John Kehoe
• A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear- eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  Rachel Carson
• As children we had a sense of wonder. Our eyes were wide open and drinking in the gifts we beheld. Our thirsty souls could not get enough of the wonders of creation. Then, somehow, we grew too old to dream. We tired of the abundance of the world and stepped away from the banquet of life. The gift of wonder God gave us as children was meant to be kept alive. Instead, we have let wonder go to sleep. Edward Hays
• But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand. Jody Lynn Nye
• Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.  Eugene Ionesco
• I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe.  Shinichi Suzuki
• I want to giggle myself to sleep each night and jump on the fluffy, comforting pillows of faith. Terri Guillemets
• If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. Rachel Carson
• Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead. Richard Bach
• One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• So now you must choose… Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable – bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder… Jostein Gaarder
• The child lives in the neighbourhood of wonder where innocence keeps mystery playful. Each new event and encounter is all absorbing. John O’Donohue
• The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives. Albert Einstein
• There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million. Walt Streightiff
• To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Wonder,  Awe,  Delight

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Revive your curiosity

• Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common – inquisitiveness. Edwin Bulwar- Lytton
• Enlightenment takes place when one lets his innocence emerge and sees nature and life with a childlike awe and respect. The ‘why’ of a child is repeated over and over, causing questions and the never-ending process of discovery. Charles DuBack
• Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.” Hugh MacLeod
• A child is an island of curiosity surrounded by a sea of question marks.
• Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. Aldous Huxley
• Children ask better questions than adults. “May I have a cookie?” “Why is the sky blue?” and “What does a cow say?” are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than “Where’s your manuscript?” Why haven’t you called?” and “Who’s your lawyer?”  Fran Lebowitz
• Curiosity

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Revive your sense of fairness

• Children are born with such a sense of fairness that they will accept no less than equal treatment for all. I know – I have three. I hope that as they grow, they keep that sense of justice and learn to challenge the old adage that life’s not fair. It should be, in so far as we have control of it. Beth Vanden Hoek
• Fairness,  Justice

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Revive your open mindedness

• Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. Thomas Huxley
• Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see. Douglas Adams
• Open-mindedness

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Revive your honesty

• Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children. Oliver Wendell
• An honest man is always a child. Socrates
• Honesty

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Revive your enthusiasm

• The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. Aldous Huxley
• Enthusiasm

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Revive your sense of anything is possible

• Step forward into your life as you did when you were a child, when you believed anything was possible. Vince Gowmon
• Possibility

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Revive your courage

• Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life. John Bradshaw
• Courage

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Revive your imagination

• One of the virtues of being very young is that you don’t let the facts get in the way of your imagination. Sam Levenson
• We were born with a natural tendency to focus on love. Our imaginations were creative and flourishing, and we knew how to use them. We were connected to a richer world, a world full of enchantment and a sense of the miraculous. What happened? Marianne Williamson
• Imagination

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Reviving the inner child unleashes creativity

• I am often accused of being childish. I prefer to interpret that as child-like.  I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things.  I tend to exaggerate and fantasize and embellish.  I still listen to instinctual urges.  I play with leaves.  I skip down the street and run against the wind.  I never water my garden without soaking myself.  It has been after such times of joy that I have achieved my greatest creativity and produced my best work. Leo F. Buscaglia, Bus 9 to Paradise
• Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. Norman Podhoretz
• Creativity

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Reviving the inner child unleashes happiness

• Be happy for no reason, like a child. If you are happy for a reason, you’re in trouble because that reason can be taken from you.  Deepak Chopra
• You will find more happiness growing down than up.
• It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. Bruce Williamson
• There are three things that a child can teach an adult: To be happy for no reason; to be always busy doing something; And to know how to demand – with all one’s might – what one wants. Paulo Coelho
• If my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this. Kitaro Nishida
• The only truly happy people are children and the creative minority. Jean Caldwell
• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.  K. Chesterton
• Happiness

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Accept, love, and care for the child within you

• There is within each of us a child. A child who, to one degree or another, did not receive the parenting he or she wanted.  There was not enough love or care or support.  We keep looking for someone to be the good parent, someone to count on.  We demand that our own parents change and apologize for their mistakes or inadequacies. They often become defensive and refuse; they didn’t have a “total” parent, either.  There is only one way to get superb parenting of the child who will always be within you.  Only one person truly knows what that child wants.  Only one person will, or can, love and nurture that child to the point of peace and joy.  Only one person can be the good mother, father, brother, sister.  You are your best parent and friend.  Accept, love, and care for the child within you. Joan Chittister
• Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals. Martha Beck
• Acceptance,  Love

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Smile and laugh like a child does

• There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart, heard every day in the merry voice of childhood, the expression of a laughter – – loving spirit that defies analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or mechanical in it, and totally without social significance. Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man. Without egotism and full of feeling, laughter is the music of life. Sir William Osler
• Children smile 400 times a day on average … adults 15 times. Children laugh 150 times a day … adults 6 times per day. Children play between 4-6 hours a day … adults only 20 minutes a day. What’s happened? Robert Holden
• The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better. Wayne Dyer
• Watching a child’s laughter teaches a candle’s flame how to dance. SunWolf
• Smile,  Laughter

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Slow down like a child

• Recently I’ve begun to slow down and do things one at a time. I’m inspired–and simultaneously exasperated-  -by my son who, like most six-year-olds, likes to take his time to get to where he wants to be.  It’s as if he truly savors the path more than the destination. As I prod him to “hurry up,” he slows down to relish his journey even more.  Leslie Levine
• Slow down

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Do what makes you happy when you were a child

• Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.  K. Chesterton
• Kids are great role models for life beyond the clock. Recall what you dreamt about as a kid and pursue some of those interests. Christine Louise Hohlbaum

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Like children, be present in each moment and embrace the day

• Children are natural Zen masters; their world is brand new in each and every moment. John Bradshaw
• Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do. Jean de la Bruyere
• Anticipate the day as if it was your birthday and you are turning six again. Mike Dolan
• Live in the present

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Spend time with children, watch them and let them teach you

• Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool. Mary Catherine Bateson
• If a child is too 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 reinvent your world for you. Susan Sarandon
• While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about. Angela Schwindt
• A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires. Paulo Coelho
• When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it’s amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children. Greg Mortensont
• Learning

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Grow up to be a child

• You will find more happiness growing down than up.
• So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard
• When I grow up I want to be a little boy. Joseph Heller
• Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. C. S. Lewis

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Adults are obsolete children

• Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them. Seuss
• Adults are obsolete children. Seuss
• What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult. Sigmund Freud

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Beneath our adult surface, we all remain children

• O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. Leo Rosten
• In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colors of a rainbow. Papiha Ghosh
• A grownup is a child with layers on. Woody Harrelson

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• When I grow up I want to be a little boy. Joseph Heller
• A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. Groucho Marx
• A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. L. Mencken
• A three-year-old child is a being who gets almost as much fun out of a fifty-six dollar set of swings as it does out of finding a small green worm. Bill Vaughn
• Adolescence begins when children stop asking questions – because they know all the answers.   Evan Esar
• Adults are just obsolete children. Seuss
• Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed. Robert C. Gallagher
• Child: An island of curiosity surrounded by a sea of question marks.
• Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.
• Every child is an artist; the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. Pablo Picasso
• Gifted children: Unfortunate tykes who lack the good sense to hide their talents from overly ambitious parents.
• People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children. Bill Watterson

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