“A boy on joining wants to begin Scouting  right away.”
 “A fisherman does not bait his hook with food he  likes. He uses food the fish likes. So with boys.”

“Scouting is a man’s job cut down to a boy’s size.”

“Scouting is a game for boys under the leadership of  boys under the direction of a man.”

“Where is there a boy to whom the call of the wild  and the open road does not appeal?”

“It is important to arrange games and competition so that all Scouts of the troop take part.”

“We are not a club or a Sunday school class, but a school of the woods.”

“Fun, fighting, and feeding! These are the three indispensable elements of the boy’s world.”

“Scoutmasters need to enter into boys’ ambitions.”

“A boy is supremely confident of his own power, and dislikes being treated as a child.”

“Boys can see adventure in a dirty old duck puddle, and if the Scoutmaster is a boys’ man he can see it, too.”

“A boy can see the smoke rising from Sioux villages under the shadow of the Albert memorial.”

“Teach Scouts not how to get a living, but how to live.”

“We must change boys from a ‘what can I get’ to a ‘what can I give’ attitude.”
“The code of the knight is still the code of the gentleman today.”
“The real way to gain happiness is to give it to others.”
“In Scouting you are combating the brooding of selfishness.”
“Scoutmasters deal with the individual boy rather than with the mass.”
“Can we not interpret our adult wisdom into the language of boyhood?”
“It is only when you know a boy’s environment that you can know what influences to bring to bear.”
“It’s the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.”
“It is risky to order a boy not to do something; it immediately opens to him the adventure of doing it.”
“You can only get discipline in the mass by discipline in the individual.”
“The Scoutmaster must be alert to check badge hunting as compared to badge earning.”
“The Scout Oath and Law are our binding disciplinary force.”
“A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.”
“A boy is not a sitting-down animal.”
“Vigorous Scout games are the best form of physical education because most of them bring in moral education.”
“An invaluable step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.”
“When a boy finds someone who takes an interest in him, he responds and follows.”

“The sport in Scouting is to find the good in every boy and develop it.”
“Success in training the boy depends largely on the Scoutmaster’s own personal example.”
“Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.”
“Show me a poorly uniformed troop and I’ll show you a poorly uniformed leader.”
“The more responsibility the Scoutmaster gives his patrol leaders, the more they will respond.”
“It should be the thing never to mention unfairness of judging when defeated in a contest.”
“The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.”
“O God, help me to win, but in thy wisdom if thou willest me not to win, then O God, make me a good loser.”
“There is no teaching to compare with example.”
“We do not want to make Scout training too soft.”
“The Good Turn will educate the boy out of the groove of selfishness.”
“When you want a thing done, ‘Don’t do it yourself’ is a good motto for Scoutmasters.”
“Loyalty is a feature in a boy’s character that inspires boundless hope.”
“See things from the boy’s point of view.”
“The boy is not governed by don’t, but is led by do.”
“The object of the patrol method is not so much saving the Scoutmaster trouble as to give responsibility to the boy.”
“The most important object in Boy Scout training is to educate, not instruct.”
“Scoutmasters need the capacity to enjoy the out-of-doors.”
“A boy is naturally full of humor.”
“If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.”
“A boy carries out suggestions more wholeheartedly when he understands their aim.”
“The Scoutmaster guides the boy in the spirit of an older brother.”
“To get a hold on boys you must be their friend.”
“In Scouting, a boy is encouraged to educate himself instead of being instructed.”
“The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.”


“Here are some of the things that Scouting is not:
• it is not a charity organisation for people in society to run for the benefit of
the poor children;
• it is not a school having a definite curriculum and standards of achievement;
• it is not a brigade of officers and privates for drilling manliness into boys
and girls;
• it is not a show where surface results are gained through payment as merit
badges, medals, etc.;
These all come from without, whereas the
Scout training all comes from within.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, 1919 edition.
“Education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents to the full and to realize our creative potential, including responsibility for our own lives and achievement of our personal aims.”
- “Learning: The Treasure Within”, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, 1996.
“The aim of development is the complete fulfilment of man, in all the richness of his or her personality, the complexity of his or her forms of expression and his or her various commitments - as individual, member of a family and of a community, citizen and producer, inventor of techniques and creative dreamer.”
- ”Learning: The Treasure Within”, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, 1996.
“Scouting is a medicine composed of various ingredients and, unless they are mixed in their proper proportions according to the prescription, the users must not blame the doctor if the effects on the patient are unsatisfactory.”
- Baden-Powell, Jamboree, 1922.
“Is it possible to devise a form of education which might make it possible to avoid conflicts or resolve them peacefully by developing respect for other people, their cultures and their spiritual values?”
- ”Learning: The Treasure Within”, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, 1996.
“The boy is not governed by DON’T, but led on by DO.
The Scout Law is devised as a guide to his actions, rather than as repressive of
his faults.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, World Brotherhood
edition, 1944.
“...It is important to provide children and young people with every opportunity for discovery and experiment - aesthetic, artistic, sporting, scientific, cultural and social.”
- “Learning: The Treasure Within”, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century, 1996.
“Self-education, that is, what a boy learns for himself, is what is going to stick by him and guide him later on in life, far more than anything that is imposed upon him through instruction by a teacher.”
- “Scouting for Boys”, Baden-Powell, 26th edition, 1951.
“Scouting puts the boys into fraternity gangs which is their natural organisation whether for games, mischief or loafing.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, World Brotherhood edition, 1944.
“The patrol system leads each boy to see that he has some individual responsibility for the good of his Patrol. It leads each Patrol to see that it has definite responsibility for the good of the Troop.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, World Brotherhood edition, 1944.
“When people work together on rewarding projects which take them out of their usual routine, differences and even conflicts between individuals tend to fade into the background and sometimes disappear. People derive a new identity from such projects, so that it is possible to go beyond individual routines and highlight what people have in common rather than the differences between them.”
- “Learning: The Treasure Within”, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, 1996.
“Had we called it what is was, viz, a ‘Society for the Propagation of Moral Attributes’, the boy would not exactly have rushed for it. But to call it Scouting and give him the chance of becoming an embryo Scout, was quite another pair of shoes.”
- ”Lessons from the ‘Varsity of Life”, Baden-Powell, 1933.
“The capacity for awareness of sensory experiences is critical to the development of meaning... Meaning derives from a profoundly held relation to the revelatory power of the symbols. Yet the symbol becomes an objectified ‘other’ if it is not grounded in the senses.”
- “The Possible Human”, Jean Houston, J.P. Tarcher, 1982.
“Every flower of the field, every fiber of a plant, every particle of an insect, carries with it the impress of its Maker, and can - if duly considered - read us lectures of ethics or divinity.”
- “A Natural History”, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 1693.
“With the color that paints the morning and evening clouds that face the sun, I saw then the whole heaven suffused.”
- “Divine Comedy”, Dante.
“{Camping in nature} makes me feel freer... You have to get away from the usual comforts, and deal with things... You really realise it afterwards.”
- “Educational impact of Scouting: Three case studies on adolescence”, WOSM, 1995.
“He who is in harmony with Nature hits the mark without effort and apprehends the truth without thinking.”
- Confucius
“Human life is embedded in nature, humans are caught up in natural systems; to act as though this is not the case harms nature and ultimately endangers human survival.”
- “Global Teacher, Global Learner”, Graham Pike and David Selby, Hodder and Stoughton, 1989.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cheshire Cat.
- “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Lewis Carroll.
“...Holistic education must acknowledge the multiple dimensions of the human personality... thus moving towards the perennial dream of an integrated individual living on a harmonious planet.”
- “Learning: The Treasure Within, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century”, article by Karan Singh, 1996.
“The Scoutmaster has to be neither schoolmaster nor commanding officer, nor pastor, nor instructor. He has got to put himself on the level of the older brother, that is, to see things from the boy’s point of view, and to lead and guide and give enthusiasm in the right direction.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, World Brotherhood edition, 1944.
“The principles of Scouting are all in the right direction. The success in their application depends on the Scoutmaster and how he applies them.”
- “Aids to Scoutmastership”, Baden-Powell, World Brotherhood edition, 1944.
“There are leaders the people FEAR.
There are leaders the people HATE.
There are leaders the people LOVE.
But when the best leaders of all have finished their work, the people say,
‘We did it ourselves’.
- Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher.
“He helps us to be what we want to be.”
- “Educational impact of Scouting: Three case studies on adolescence”, WOSM, 1995.
“You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
... Seek not to make them like you, for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
- “The Prophet”, Kahlil Gibran.
Here I am camped by a rushing river between forest-clad hills.
Heaven is not a vague something somewhere up in the sky, but is right here in
this world in your own heart and surroundings.
By a camp fire the mind can open out and receive great thoughts and higher
impulses.
The study of nature brings into a harmonious whole the question of the infinite, the historic and the microscopic as part of the Great Creator’s whole.
Don’t be content with the what but get to know the why and the how.
If you ever feel hopeless about getting on to success in life from a small beginning remember that even that great strong tree, the oak, began at first as a
little acorn, lying on the ground.
Patience has more to do with success than almost any other quality.
Boys can see adventure in a dirty old duck-puddle... Without adventure, life
would be deadly dull.
As we get into our crabbed old age, we are apt to forget that we were once
youngsters.
God has given us a world to live in that is full of beauties and wonders and
He has given us not only eyes to see them, but minds to understand them, if
we only have the sense to look at them in that light.
- Compilation of Baden-Powell’s texts