Daily Inspiration Quote by William Lyon Phelps

Phelps slips a barb into a compliment, and the sting is the point. The line pretends to celebrate childhood beauty, then yanks the reader into an adult’s weary confession: kids are charming because, without that charm, we might not put up with them. It’s a tidy piece of educator-humor, the kind that lets a professorial voice sound candid rather than cruel.

The intent is less anti-child than pro-civilization. By framing “sense” as something acquired, Phelps treats maturity as an earned social competence, not a natural state. The subtext flatters adults as the keepers of order while quietly admitting how thin that order can feel in the face of youthful chaos. “Tolerated” is the loaded word: it suggests patience as a social performance, a duty extended until the child becomes legible to adult norms. Meanwhile, “lovely to look upon” reduces children to an aesthetic argument for their own protection. It’s affectionate, but it’s also objectifying in a way that reflects early 20th-century sentimentality: childhood as innocence on display.

Context matters: Phelps came out of a world of Victorian moral instruction shifting into modern mass education. The classroom was becoming a factory for “sense” - discipline, manners, self-control - and educators were expected to civilize without seeming punitive. This quip does that balancing act. It grants adults permission to feel exasperation, then converts that exasperation into a cosmic design: nature, not the teacher, rigged the system so we don’t abandon the young before they can join the social contract.