Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism <!-- p. 185 -->
Context: To perceive is to construct intellectually, and if the child draws things as he conceives them, it is certainly because he cannot perceive them without conceiving them. But to give up gradually the spurious absolutes situated away and apart from the context of relations that has been built up during experience itself is the work of a superior kind of rationality. When the child comes to draw things as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and has begun to construct real systems of relations which take account of the true perspective in which things are connected.
“He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”
Source: The Road
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Cormac McCarthy 270
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933Related quotes
Book III, ch. 19. http://books.google.com/books?id=7e0NAAAAYAAJ&q=%22For+he+who+is+unmusical+is+a+child+in+music+he+who+is+without+letters+is+a+child+in+learning+he+who+is+untaught+is+a+child+in+life%22&pg=PA241#v=onepage
Discourses
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness
“He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.”
"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", ch. I, in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)
Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 233
The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature (1963)
Context: It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.
Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 188