“A child shows his toy, a man hides his.”

El niño muestra su juguete, el hombre lo esconde.
Voces (1943)

Original

El niño muestra su juguete, el hombre lo esconde.

Voces (1943)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A child shows his toy, a man hides his." by Antonio Porchia?
Antonio Porchia photo
Antonio Porchia 276
Italian Argentinian poet 1885–1968

Related quotes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Stephen Crane photo

“Tell her this
And more,—
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With surplus of toys.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

Source: Complete Poems of Stephen Crane

“The child manifests the same reactions of defiance and obedience. The child, too, can hide his stubbornness behind an excessive docility”

Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) Austrian physician and psychologist

Sadism and Masochism : The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, Vol. 1 (1939), p. 46
Context: An intense, unyielding stubbornness hides beneath an apparent obedience (the patient brings a vast number of dreams; his associations become endless; he produces an inexhaustible number of recollections, which seem to him very important but are actually of little moment; or he goes off upon some byroad suggested by the analyst and leads the latter into a blind alley).
The child manifests the same reactions of defiance and obedience. The child, too, can hide his stubbornness behind an excessive docility (the parent's command: You must be industrious. Industry may become a mania so that the child neither goes out nor has time to sleep). Obedience is the giving up of the resistance; obstinacy the setting up of fresh resistances. This resistance is externally active. We have in recent years had sufficient opportunity to observe the law of resistance (the passive resistance). Activity and defiance show great differences. Defiance is the reaction against activity (aggression) of the environment. It may then manifest itself actively or passively and stands in the service of the defensive tendency of the ego. Every resistance reveals the ego (one's own) in conflict with another.

“Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Fall of a City"
Selected Poems (1941)
Context: All the lessons learned, unlearned;
The young, who learned to read, now blind
Their eyes with an archaic film;
The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune
Following the donkey`s bray;
These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses
On the high door of a skull and in some corner
Of an irrefrangible eye
Some old man memory jumps to a child
— Spark from the days of energy.
And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

Halldór Laxness photo

“The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”

the self-conscious policeman
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Georg Brandes photo

“The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

[paraphrasing Nietzsche] p. 11
An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889)

Robert Jordan photo

“In the Borderlands, sheepherder, if a man has the raising of a child, that child is his, and none can say different.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

al'Lan Mandragoran to Rand al'Thor
(15 November 1990)

Robert Graves photo

“The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Babylon"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Kate Bush photo

“Ooh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Related topics