“Children are … encouraged to be imitators, a course to which they are already too much inclined. No one thinks of making them original, courageous, independent.”

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 185.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Children are … encouraged to be imitators, a course to which they are already too much inclined. No one thinks of makin…" by Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues?
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues 60
French writer, a moralist 1715–1747

Related quotes

Bertrand Russell photo

“I think modern educational theorists are inclined to attach too much importance to the negative virtue of not interfering with children, and too little to the positive merit of enjoying their company.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 12: Education and Discipline

Judith Butler photo

“Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.”

Judith Butler (1956) American philosopher and gender theorist

"Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out (1991) edited by Diana Fuss

François-René de Chateaubriand photo

“An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) French writer, politician, diplomat and historian

Source: The Genius of Christianity or the Spirit and Beauty of the Christian Religion

John Von Neumann photo

“I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

"The Mathematician", in The Works of the Mind (1947) edited by R. B. Heywood, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Context: I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.

Joseph Arch photo
Brené Brown photo

“I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Virginia Woolf photo
Pauline Kael photo

“Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.”

"Drifters, Dopes and Dopers," review of 8 Million Ways to Die (1986-05-19), p. 156.
Hooked (1989)

Salman Khan photo
Adam Smith photo

“Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book I, Chapter VIII, p. 87.

Related topics