infancy quotes

Women are from their very Infancy debarred those advantages, with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect brick where theyafford no straw.

- Mary Astell
  A Serious Proposal to the Ladies For the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest,'By a Lover of Her Sex', pt.1.

We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair; We sowed in youth a mustard seed, We cut an almond rod; We are now grown up to riper age Are they withered in the sod?

- Charlotte Bronte« 
  'We Wove a Web in Childhood'.

We canonlysay that helived intheinfancyofour poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first.

-John Dryden
  Fables  Ancient and Modern, preface,'In Praise of Chaucer'.

He trailed the clouds of his own gloryafter him; hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths. SeeWordsworth 926:24.

- (Henry) Graham Greene
  Brighton Rock, pt.2, ch.2.

Surely, it is in youth man is most thoroughly depraved. Hell lies about us in our infancy. The youthful innocency sung by aged poets (who forget their first childhood) is nothing but ignorance of evil. As the child comes to know evil, he loves it.

-Yukio pseudonym of  Hiraoka Kimitake Mishima
  In the Jail Journal,13  Apr.

If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

- Sean O'Faolain
  The Irish.

In unexperienc'd Infancy Many a sweet mistake doth lie.

-Thomas Traherne
'Shadows in theWater' (published1903).

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his wayattended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

-William Wordsworth
c.1802^1803  'Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', stanza 5 (published1807).