10/02/2025
Swami Vivekanandaâs Quote On Children
1) A child comes into the world crawling and without teeth, and the old man gets out without teeth and crawling. The extremes are alike, but the one has no experience of the life before him, while the other has gone through it all.
2) A child is born with certain tendencies. Whence do they come? No child is born with a tabula rasa â with a clean, blank page â of a mind. The page has been written on previously. The old Greek and Egyptian philosophers taught that no child came with a vacant mind. Each child comes with a hundred tendencies generated by past conscious actions. It did not acquire these in this life, and we are bound to admit that it must have had them in past lives.
3) All know their own Self, all know, âI amâ, even animals. All we know is the projection of the Self. Teach this to the children, they can grasp it.[Source]
Children are born optimists, but the rest of life is a continuous disillusionment; not one ideal can be fully attained, not one thirst can be quenched. So on they go trying to solve the riddle, and religion has taken up the task.
4) Do you think you can teach even a child? You cannot. The child teaches himself. Your duty is to afford opportunities and to remove obstacles.
5) Every child is a born optimist; he dreams golden dreams. In youth he becomes still more optimistic. It is hard for a young man to believe that there is such a thing as death, such a thing as defeat or degradation. Old age comes, and life is a mass of ruins. Dreams have vanished into the air, and the man becomes a pessimist.
6) Every child that is born sees the sky overhead very far away, but is that any reason why we should not look towards the sky? Would it mend matters to go towards superstition?
7) Impress upon your children that true religion is positive and not negative, that it does not consist in merely refraining from evil, but in a persistent performance of noble decals. True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.
8) It is good to be born a child, but bad to remain a child.
9) It is useless to tell children that this world is all good, all flowers, all milk and honey.
10) Let there be action without reaction; action is pleasant, all misery is reaction. The child puts its hand in the flame, that is pleasure; but when its system reacts, then comes the pain of burning. When we can stop that reaction, then we have nothing to fear. Control the brain and do not let it read the record; be the witness and do not react, only thus can you be happy. The happiest moments we ever know are when we entirely forget ourselves. Work of your own free will, not from duty. We have no duty. This world is just a gymnasium in which we play; our life is an eternal holiday.
11) Men are taught from childhood that they are weak and sinners. Teach them that they are all glorious children of immortality, even those who are the weakest in manifestation. Let positive, strong, helpful thought enter into their brains from very childhood.
12) Misery begins with the birth of the child. Weak and helpless, he enters the world. The first sign of life is weeping. Now, how could we be the cause of misery when we find it at the very beginning? We have caused it in the past.
13) The Chinese child is quite a philosopher and calmly goes to work at an age when your Indian boy can hardly crawl on all fours.
14) âThe child is father of the man.â Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin?
15) There is hardly a child, born in any country in the world, who has not been told, âDo not steal,â âDo not tell a lie,â but nobody tells the child how he can help doing them. Talking will not help him. Why should he not become a thief? We do not teach him how not to steal; we simply tell him, âDo not steal.â Only when we teach him to control his mind do we really help him.
16) There is misery everywhere. The child is born with a cry upon its lips; it is its first utterance. This child becomes a man, and so well used to misery that the pang of the heart is hidden by a smile on the lips.
17) There is neither heaven nor hell nor this world; all three never really existed. Tell a child a lot of ghost stories, add let him go out into the street in the evening. There is a little stump of a tree. What does the child see? A ghost, with hands stretched out, ready to grab him.
18) We foolishly want to limit the whole universe with our present experience. Children think that the whole universe is full of children. Madmen think the whole universe a lunatic asylum, and so on.
19) You may read any amount of booksâĻ. Crowd into the child fifty thousand words a moment, teach him all the theories and philosophiesâĻ. There is only one science that will teach him facts, and that is psychologyâĻ. And the work begins with control of the breath.
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Vivek Vanii Welfare Society
Teliamura, Khowai, Tripura, India
