Thoughts

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The collective wisdom and experience of humanity's sages, mystics, leaders, and teachers from throughout the ages is held within our consciousness through quotes, proverbs, and adages. When we choose to truly 'hear' their words, we allow a new idea or way of being to be planted in our mind, like a seed in fertile soil. Then we simply need to tend the new idea and support it as it grows to full maturity.  (Note, I said 'simply' ... not necessarily 'easily'!)

Why the image of the wolf?  Because the wolf is revered as being the greatest of all teachers. The wolf is known as the pathfinder, the forerunner of new ideas who returns to the clan to teach and share.  Further, the wolf has an enormous sense of family, and is devoted to community, which are values that Little Acorn Books honours and advocates.  Those of us who choose to parent and educate within this new parenting paradigm are forerunners. Like the wolf, we are seeking out and embracing new ideas and then returning to our individual communities to serve as teachers and role models.

Our books share much of the exciting, new knowledge that is now available to us through breakthrough research in attachment theory, neurobiology and psychology etc, while quotes and proverbs share with us the wisdom of our forebears. Below is a selection of our personal favourites ... companions on our journey thus far.  While a handful are specific to parenting and home educating (and a few are just for fun!), the majority are to do with embracing social change, and finding the courage we need to truly live a life of integrity.  We share these in the hope that they may be of service to you, as well, in living and parenting in accordance with your own heart, in finding your own voice, and in strengthening your commitment to using it.

• "There are two things we can give our children - one is roots; the other wings." - Hodding Carter

• "Nothing that results in human progress is achieved with unanimous consent.  Those who are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of others." - Columbus

• "To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform." - Theodore H White

• "The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it." - Woodrow Wilson

• "You will find no higher calling, greater blessing, finer teacher, or more spiritual journey than the raising of your child." - Dan Millman

• "It is easier to build strong children, than repair broken men." - Frederick Douglas

• "The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice."  - Peggy OMara

• "While counting may appear to be a magic form of discipline, there is no magic in threats. Children know that adults are bigger and more powerful than they are. They comply in self defense." - Pam Leo

• "Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff." - Catherine M. Wallace

• "Pay attention and stay centered.  You carry the mantle of 'Mother,' the eternal principle of balance and stability.  When your children's energy is scattered, be grounded.  When your children throw tantrums, be still.  Know what you stand for.  Be firm and consistent to teach your children about boundaries.  Thus you will root them in health and release their souls to limitless." - Vimala McClure, 'The Tao of Motherhood'

• "What's done to children, they will do to society." - Karl Menninger

• The highest reward for a persons toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it. - John Ruskin

• Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better? - Jane Nelson

• "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." Victor Frankl

• "Unpack your baggage, so your kids don't have to carry it." - Lu Hanessian

• "A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they shall never sit." - Greek Proverb

• "Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is." - Yoda

• "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see." - Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood 

• ‎"Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other, and in the home begins the disruption of peace of the world." - Mother Theresa

• ‎"It is never too late to strengthen our connection with our children. Every moment is a new opportunity to strengthen the bond." - Pam Leo, Connection Parenting

• The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of my children sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing, dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the 'doing' a little more and the 'getting it done' a little less. - Anna Quindlen

• "Superficial 'good behavior' obtained through threats and punishment can only take place until the child is old enough to fight back. But if trust, kindness, and empathy are kept intact within the child from birth and strengthened by parental examples of those qualities, they will last a lifetime." - Jan Hunt

• "A child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer." - Unknown

• "Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other; on the contrary, they breed and reinforce each other." - Haim Ginott

• "There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all." - Jacqueline Kennedy

• "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers." - Harry S. Truman

• "The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself." - Rita Mae Brown

• "Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul." - Virginia Woolf

• "Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it.  Impossible is not a fact; it's an opinion.  Impossible is not a declaration; it's a dare.  Impossible is potential.  Impossible is temporary.  Impossible is nothing." - Muhammad Ali

• "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

• "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo

• "Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill

• "The truth will set you free.  But first, it will piss you off." - Gloria Steinem

"Happiness isn't the only acceptable emotion." - Crystal Lutton

• "You will always be your child's favorite toy." - Vicki Lansky

• "Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when grow up, because they're looking for ideas." - Paula Poundstone  ;-)

• "When we force children to submit to unwanted affection in order not to offend a relative or hurt a friend's feelings, we teach them that their bodies do not really belong to them because they have to push aside their own feelings about what feels right to them. This leads to children getting sexually abused, teen girls submitting to sexual behavior so 'he'll like me' and kids enduring bullying because everyone is 'having fun.' " - Irene van der Zande

• "Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind." - James Russell Lowell

• "I can't stop acquiring books.  It's a kind of necessity. But I'm not guilty about it.  Books, to me, are like oxygen. I'm a fish swimming in an aquarium of the intellect." - Duncan Fallowell, speaking of his glorious library

• "Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." - Charles W Eliot

• "Once your mind is stretched to a new dimension, it never returns." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

• "You cannot wake a person who is pretending to be asleep." - Navajo Proverb

• "A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face.  It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy." - Edward P Morgan

• "I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves." - EM Forster

• "Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." - Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

• "The person who does not read good books has no advantage over the person who cannot read them." - Mark Twain

• "Books are delightful society.  If you go into a room and find it full of books - even without taking them from the shelves - they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome." - William Ewart Gladstone

• "I've always wanted to wander, and I can wander very conveniently in my library ... see what other people are up to in entirely different places, in entirely different cultures. How are they dealing with the problem of breathing in and out before you drop dead?" - Duncan Fallowell

• "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.  Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx  ;-)

• "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas." - Agatha Christie

• "Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government's; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don't want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually." - John Holt

  

• "Imagine being forced by law to go every day to an institution where people make you stand in lines, sit on the floor and listen for hours to talk that is of no interest to you; where they restrict your movement, shout at you and punish you for being lively; where they take away your 'privileges' (your freedom, your clothes or your belongings) for saying what you think. The fact that basic human rights are called privileges when applied to children is telling in itself. In order to oppress children and to allow these atrocities to go on with a clear conscience we adults must dehumanise children - we say they are not yet people." - Joanna Gore, Leave me Alone

• "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham H. Maslow

• "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."   George Bernard Shaw

• "Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." - Beatrix Potter

• "It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water." - Claude Monet

• "I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life." - Petronius, 27- 66 CE, The Satyricon

• "She gave me all the materials I could wish for and then left me alone, didn't smother me with instruction. Not that I ever took instruction very easily. My favorite days were when I had a cold and could stay home from school and draw all day long.... She was an enthusiastic painter of oils and watercolors. She was also very generous. I could mess with her paints and brushes all I wanted. On one condition: that I kept my brushes clean. The only art lesson my mother gave me was how to wash my brushes. Otherwise, she left me alone." - Barbara Cooney, author of many award winning children's books including Miss Rumphius, speaking about her mother

• "A truly good book teaches me better than to read it.  I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint ... What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." - Henry David Thoreau

• "The wellbeing of our own children can only be secured when the wellbeing of all children is secure." - Lilian Katz, Professor Emeritus, U. of Illinois

• "Not for ourselves alone, but for all humanity, let us hasten to find the path that leads to liberty, safety, and peace for everyone." - Thomas Jefferson

• "It is the bravery of a mother who makes personal sacrifices for her children's well-being, and then is able to let them go to their own destinies." -  Vimala McClure, 'The Tao of Motherhood'

• "I am only one, but I am still one.  I cannot do everything, but I can still do something.  And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do." - Helen Keller

• "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can do only a little. Do what you can." Sydney Smith    (This quote, together with Peter H Reynold's The Dot, and insightful advice from my then-6-yo son, started Little Acorn Books!)

• "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

• "If you have never said, "Excuse me," to a parking meter or bashed your shins on a fireplug, you are probably wasting too much valuable reading time." - Sherri Chasin Calvo

• "He who lends a book is an idiot.  He who returns the book is more of an idiot." - Arabic Proverb   ;-)

• "Play is so important to optimal child development that it has been recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights as a right of every child." - Kenneth R. Ginsburg MD, MSEd, Associate Professor of Paediatrics 

• "Few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children's happiness than for their success." - Erich Fromm

• "You can't please everybody if you are going to make a difference in this world." - Melvin Chapman

• "Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticised anyway.  You'll be damned if you do and damned if you don't." - Eleanor Roosevelt

• "When we speak, we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed.  But when we are silent, we are still afraid.  So, it is better to speak." - Audre Lorde

• "I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think. - Aristotle

• "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost

• "That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know to be right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong." - William J H Boetcker

• "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer.  It sings because it has a song." - Maya Angelou

• "As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." - Goethe

• "Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly." - St Francis de Sales

• "Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least." - Goethe

• "Better to light a candle than curse the darkness." - Confucius

• "If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are going." - Chinese Proverb

• "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." - Confucius

• "Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise.  Rather seek what they sought." - Bassho

• "You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." - Erica Jong

• "Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing." - Alexander Woollcott

• "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it's stupid." - Albert Einstein

• "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." - Anna Quindlen

• 'No furniture is so charming as books.' Sydney Smith

• "If you're not making mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems ... and that's a big mistake." - Frank Wilczek

• "When you first begin to practice, you should not expect too much." - His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

• "While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior." - Henry C Link

• "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it," - Pablo Picasso

• "If you would truly make a difference in the world, meditate not on your foibles but on your strengths; find your talent, your passion, your destiny; follow that path where it leads." - Dan Millman

• "Take the first step in faith.  You don't have to see the whole staircase; just take the first step." - Dr Martin Luther King Jr

• "When someone finds his path, he cannot be afraid. He needs to have the courage to go astray.  Disappointments, defeats and despair are the tools God uses to show us the path." - Paulo Coelho, Brida

• "When you travel towards your objective, be sure to pay attention to the path. The path teaches us the best way to arrive and enriches us while we are travelling along it." - Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

• "It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally.  It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand." - Madeleine L'Engle

• "Lessons always arrive when you are ready for them, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step." - Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

• "You can't cross the sea merely by staring at the water." - Rabindranath Tagore

• "A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner." - English Proverb

• "In examining the potential of individuals, we must focus on their strengths and not just their mistakes.  We cannot be limited by what they may have spilled in the kitchen." - William Pollard

• "Do not worry if others do not understand you.  Instead, worry if you do not understand others." - Confucius

• "I don't like that man.  I must get to know him better." - Abraham Lincoln

• "I have never met a man so ignorant that I could not learn something from him." - Galileo Galilei

• "We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives.  Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice.  We can make our choices built from love or from fear." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

• "Apparently, there is nothing that cannot happen today." - Mark Twain

• "I gave my life to be the person I am.  Was it worth it?" - Richard Bach

• "We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel unsure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Marianne Williamson

• "We are not powerless specks of dust drifting around in the wind, blown by random destiny.  We are, each of us, like beautiful snowflakes - unique, and born for a specific reason and purpose." - Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

• "There are no accidents. You are here for the purpose that you signed up for before you entered the world of particles and form." - Wayne Dyer

• "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?" - Robert Schuller

• "If you wish to be a writer, write." - Epictetus

• "How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." - Henry David Thoreau

• "Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life." - Jesse Lee Bennett

• "The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

• "When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others." - Peace Pilgrim

• "If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do.  Think up something appropriate and do it." - Edgar Watson Howe

• "Never worry about numbers.  Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you." - Mother Teresa

• The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. Peter De Vries

• "We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today." - Stacia Tauscher

• You know you are face-to-face with the unfinished business of your own childhood when you respond with strong negative feelings to a (child's) behaviour. Harville Hendrix, Giving the Love that Heals

• "To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better; whether by a healthy child; a garden patch; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived ... This is to have succeeded!" - Emerson

• "A wise old owl sat in an oak.  The more he heard, the less he spoke.  The less he spoke, the more he heard.  Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?" - Unknown

• "Half an hour's meditation each day is essential, except when you are busy.  Then a full hour is needed." - St Francis de Sales

• "People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centred; love them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies, succeed anyway.  If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. The biggest person with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest person with the smallest mind; think big anyway.  If you find serenity and happiness, people may be jealous; be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway.  You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa

• "In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves ... self-discipline, with all of them, came first." - Harry S Truman

• "You've got to get up every morning with determination, if you're going to go to bed with satisfaction." - George Horace Lorimer

• "Discipline is remembering what you want." - David Campbell

• "First we form habits, then they form us.  Conquer your bad habits or they will conquer you." - Rob Gilbert

• "What lies in our power to do, lies in our power not to do." - Aristotle

• "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein

• "I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to." - Albert Einstein

• "When I get a little money, I buy books.  And if any is left, I buy food and clothes." - Erasmus 

• "Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone." - Gladys Brown Stern

• "And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anais Nin