''I have no name:'' I am but two days old. ''What shall I call thee?'' I happy am, ''Joy is my name.'' sweet joy befall thee!
A baby is born with a need to be loved and never outgrows it.
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.
Babies are necessary to grown-ups. A new baby is like the beginning of all things –wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. In a world that is cutting down its trees to build highways, losing its earth to concrete… babies are almost the only remaining link with nature, with the natural world of living things from which we spring.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways –and all are right! At least all will do.
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
I don't dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.
I have no name: I am but two days old. What shall I call thee? I happy am, Joy is my name. Sweet joy befall thee!
If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby ''it.''
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.
It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.
Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger — to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.
Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.
No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.