Children

Swami Vivekananda On Children
In this article you'll find Swami Vivekananda's quotes and comments on children. Please
note, here we'll include only those quotes which are directly related to children. That means
in this article you'll not find quotes like—
✘ "Do you think these Sannyasin children of Shri Ramakrishna are born simply to sit
under trees lighting Dhuni - fires?. . ."
✘ "Feel, my children, feel; feel for the poor, the ignorant, the downtrodden; feel till the
heart stops and the brain reels and you. . ."
Suggested article: This article was suggested by +Sri Mâ Satya
Swami Vivekananda on Children

 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. [Source]
 A child is born with certain tendencies. Whence do they come? No child is born
with a tabula rasa — with a clean, blank page — 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.[Source]
 All know their own Self, all know, "I am", 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. [Source]
 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. [Source]
 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. [Source]
 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?[Source]
 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. [Source]
 It is good to be born a child, but bad to remain a child. [Source]
 It is useless to tell children that this world is all good, all flowers, all milk and
honey.[Source]
 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.[Source]
 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. [Source]
 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. [Source]
 "The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that
childhood is a sin or youth a sin? [Source]
 There is hardly a child, born in any country in the world, who has not been told, "Do
not steal," "Do not tell a lie," 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, "Do not steal." Only when we teach him to control his
mind do we really help him. [Source]
 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. [Source]
 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.[Source]
 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.[Source]
 You may read any amount of books.... Crowd into the child fifty thousand words a
moment, teach him all the theories and philosophies.... There is only one science that will
teach him facts, and that is psychology.... And the work begins with control of the
breath.[Source]
"If I had a child. . ." — Swami Vivekananda
Swamijit told—[Source]
If I had a child I would from its very birth begin to tell it, "Thou art the Pure One". You
have read in one of the Puranas that beautiful story of queen Madâlasâ, how as soon as she
has a child she puts her baby with her own hands in the cradle, and how as the cradle rocks
to and fro, she begins to sing, "Thou art the Pure One the Stainless, the Sinless, the Mighty
One, the Great One." Ay, there is much in that. Feel that you are great and you become
great.
In giving education to a child the law of growth has to be obeyed

Swamiji told—[Source]
How many thousands of students I know who live upon the worst food possible, and live
amidst the most horrible surroundings, what wonder that there are so many idiots,
imbeciles and cowards among them. They die like flies. The education that is given is
onesided, weakening, it is killing by inches. The children are made to cram too much of
useless matter, and are incarcerated in school rooms fifty or seventy in each, five hours
together. They are given bad food. It is forgotten that the future health of the man is in the
child. It is forgotten that nature can never be cheated and things cannot be pushed too early.
In giving education to a child the law of growth has to be obeyed. And we must learn to
wait. Nothing is more important than that the child must have a strong and healthy body.
The body is the first thing to attain to virtue. I know we are the poorest nation in the world,
and we cannot afford to do much. We can only work on the lines of least resistance. We
should see at least that our children are well fed. The machine of the child's body should
never be exhausted. In Europe and America a man with crores of rupees sends his son if
sickly, to the farmers, to till the ground. After three years he returns to the father healthy,
rosy and strong. Then he is fit to be sent to school. We ought not for these reasons push the
present system of education any further.
Why do we love children?

Here is an interesting quote. Swamiji once mentioned a saying of Yajnavalkya—[Source]
None loves the children for the children; but because one loves the Self, therefore one
loves the children. . .
On Child Psychology
According to Swami Vivekananda—[Source]
Each man in his childhood runs through the stages through which his race has come up;
only the race took thousands of years to do it, while the child takes a few years. The child
is first the old savage man — and he crushes a butterfly under his feet. The child is at first
like the primitive ancestors of his race. As he grows, he passes through different stages
until he reaches the development of his race. Only he does it swiftly and quickly.
We notice children are sometimes "instinctively afraid". Swamiji told while commenting
on Patanjali's Yoga Sutra—[Source]
We have seen that all our knowledge, whether we call it perception, or reason, or instinct,
must come through that one channel called experience, and all that we now call instinct is
the result of past experience, degenerated into instinct and that instinct regenerates into
reason again. So on throughout the universe, and upon this has been built one of the chief
arguments for reincarnation in India. The recurring experiences of various fears, in course
of time, produce this clinging to life. That is why the child is instinctively afraid, because
the past experience of pain is there in it.
"Where shall it fall?" — a story
From Jnana Yoga—[Source]
In a certain school a number of little children were being examined. The examiner had
foolishly put all sorts of difficult questions to the little children. Among others there was
this question: "Why does not the earth fall ?" His intention was to bring out the idea of
gravitation or some other intricate scientific truth from these children. Most of them could
not even understand the question, and so they gave all sorts of wrong answers. But one
bright little girl answered it with another question: "Where shall it fall?" The very question
of the examiner was nonsense on the face of it. There is no up and down in the universe;
the idea is only relative. So it is with regard to the soul; the very question of birth and death
in regard to it is utter nonsense. Who goes and who comes? Where are you not? Where is
the heaven that you are not in already? Omnipresent is the Self of man. Where is it to go?
Where is it not to go? It is everywhere.

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Swami Vivekananda On Children

Suggested article: This article was suggested by +Sri Mâ Satya

Swami Vivekananda on Children

In giving education to a child the law of growth has to be obeyed

Why do we love children?

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