"There are moments in our lives when we dedicate a kind of love and tender respect to nature in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes, as well as to human nature in children, in the customs of country folk, and to the primitive world, not because it gratifies our senses, nor yet because it satisfies our understanding or taste (the very opposite can occur in both instances), rather, simply because it is nature" (p. 83)
"It is not these objects, it is an idea represented by them which we love in them. We love in them the tacitly creative life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves.
They are what we were; they are what we should once again become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature. They are, therefore, not only the representation of our lost childhood, which eternally remains most dear to us, but fill us with a certain melancholy. But they are also representations of our highest fulfilment in the ideal, thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness" (pp. 84, 85)
"We are touched not because we look down upon the child from the height of our strength and perfection, but rather because we look upward from the limitation of our condition, which is inseparable from the determination which we have attained, to the unlimited determinacy of the child and to its pure innocence; and our emotion at such a moment is too transparently mixed with a certain melancholy for its source to be mistaken. In the child disposition and determination are represented; in us that fulfilment that forever remains far short of those. The child is therefore a lively representation to us of the ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined; hence we are in no sense moved by the notion of its poverty and limitation, but rather by the opposite: the notion of its pure and free strength, its integrity, its eternality. To a moral and sensitive person a child will be a sacred object on this account; an object, in fact, which by the greatness of an idea destroys all empirical greatness; one which, whatever else may lose in the judgement of the understanding, it regains in ample measure in the judgement of reason" (p. 87)
"It is from just this contradiction between the judgment of reason and the understanding that the quite extraordinary phenomenon arises of those mixed feelings which the naive mode of thought excites in us. It connects childlike simplicity with the childish; through the latter it exposes its weakness to the understanding and causes that smile by which we betray our (theoretical) superiority. But as soon as we have cause to believe that childish simplicity is at the same time childlike, that in consequence not lack of understanding, not incapacity, but rather a higher (practical) strength, a heart full of innocence and truth, is the source of that which out of its greatness scorns the aid of art, then that triumph of the understanding is set aside, and mockery of ingenuousness yields to admiration of simplicity" (pp. 87, 88)
"The actions and speech of children thus give us a pure impression of the naive only so long as we do not recall their incapacity for art and in any case only take into consideration the contrast between their naturalness and the artificiality in ourselves. The naive is childlikeness where it is no longer expected, and precisely on this account cannot be ascribed to actual childhood in the most rigorous sense" (p. 90)