“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)
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Antonio Porchia 276
Italian Argentinian poet 1885–1968Related quotes
Source: Complete Poems of Stephen Crane
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.
"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.

“The reason a man talks is to hide his thoughts.”
the self-conscious policeman
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

“The great man is not the child of his age but its step-child.”
[paraphrasing Nietzsche] p. 11
An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889)

“Ooh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.”
Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)