Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time, unobscured by the dust of history.

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.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

There is so much adventure that only a youth can experience. Youth is not the time to languish in pleasure - youth is the time for exploration and adventure

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.

Unconditional love: childhood’s greatest magic.

Knowledge … is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise — good or bad — that came along would be welcomed as part of the whole enthralling experience.

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap... When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

Childhood whose very happiness is love.

Laughter is timeless, imagination has no age, and dreams are forever.

We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we are born.