All JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE Quotes about “Children”

“There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.”
“There are two things parents should give their children roots and wings. Roots to give them bearing and a sense of belonging, but also wings to help free them from constraints and prejudices and give them other ways to travel (or rather, to fly).”
“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.”
“Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.”
“We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.”
“I treat my heart like a sick child and gratify its every fancy”
“Children, love one another, and if that is not possible-at least try to put up with one another.”
“The worst is that the very hardest thinking will not bring thoughts. They must come like good children of God and cry, "Here we are." You expend effort and energy thinking hard. Then, after you have given up, they come sauntering in with their hands in their pockets. If the effort had not been made to open the door, however, who knows when they could have come.”
“The child, offered the mother's breast, Will not in the beginning grab it; But soon it clings to it with zest. And thus at wisdom's copious breasts You'll drink each day with greater zest.”
“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”
“I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!”
“Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child.”
“Alas! how much there is in education, and in our social institutions, to prepare us and our children for insanity.”
“Age childish makes, they say, but 'tis not true; We're only genuine children still in Age's season. [Ger., Das Alter macht nicht kindisch, wie man spricht, Es findet uns nur noch als wahre Kinder.]”
“The bad thing is that thinking about thought doesn't help at all; one has to have it from nature so that the good ideas appear before us like free children of God calling to us: Here we are.”
“Children, like dogs, have so sharp and fine a scent that they detect and hunt out everything--the bad before all the rest. They also know well enough how this or that friend stands with their parents; and as they practice no dissimulation whatever, they serve as excellent barometers by which to observe the degree of favor or disfavor at which we stand with their parents.”
“One spares old people just as one spares children.”
“Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.”

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