Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden… The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.

Daily contact with some teachers is itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a spoken precept. Here, too, the real advantage of male over female teachers,especially for boys, is seen in their superior physical strength,which often, if highly estimated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of their moods and their discipline.

Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.

All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

Every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.

Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless

Dancing is imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonize the feelings and the intellect with the body that supports them.

Precisely what menstruation is, is not yet very well known.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.

Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

The teens are emotionally unstable and pathic. It is a natural impulse to experience hot and perfervid psychic states, and it is characterized by emotionalism. We see here the instability and fluctuations now so characteristic. The emotions develop by contrast and reaction into the opposite.

This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

Life is . . . a stream flowing from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canyon and leave its shores a desert.

Gross well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.

People don’t quit playing because they grow old. They grow old because they quit playing.

Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development.