Sylvia Ashton-Warner Quotes

Love has the quality of informing almost everything - even one's work.

I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness.

Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.

Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self - the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.

There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.

Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.

We already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

To feel as well as hear what someone says requires whole attention.

The truth is that I am enslaved... in one vast love affair with 70 children.

There's no such thing beneath the heavens as conditions favorable to art. Art must crash through or perish.

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

I've got to relearn what I was supposed to have learned.

Self-forgetfulness in creativity can lead to self-transcendence.

As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.

I am inclined to think that eating is a private thing and should be done alone, like other bodily functions.

When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.

It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.

... of the two kinds of order, the conscious and the unconscious order, only one is real. It's the order in the deep hidden places.

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

I never forgive attacks on my work.

Being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.

Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.

What can be heavier than wealth than freedom?

What a desire! ... to live in peace with that word: Myself.

A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.

When I teach people, I marry them.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth and truth rewarded me.

There is only one answer to destruc-tiveness and that is creativity.