“In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.”

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

“When we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! what a chorus!”

“What is our life? A play of passion;
our mirth: the music of division;
our mother's wombs: the tiring houses be
where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is
that sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the searching sun
are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
only we die in earnest, that's no jest.”

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives…”

“Plants are Children of the Earth; we are Children of the Æther. Our Lungs are properly our Root; we live, when we breathe; we begin our life with breathing.”

“Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,
We may our ends by our beginnings know.”

“We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth ... at a very early age. ... This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

“I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children in modern society] is compulsory schooling… and that children are sitting there, and they are taught and told what to believe; they are passive from the very beginning – and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ […] the child isRight from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told?”

“For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?”