Janusz Korczak Quotes

Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be - The unknown person inside each of them is the hope for the future.

I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be concerned about the world, about man.

Dare to dream... something will always come of it

A hundred children, a hundred individuals who are people--not people-to-be, not people of tomorrow, but people now, right now--today.

Each person carries an entire world within himself, and everything exists twice: once the way it is, the other the way he perceives it with his own eyes and feelings.

I am a butterfly drunk with life. I don't know where to soar, but I won't allow life to clip my beautiful wings.

Whatever has been achieved through pressure and violence is unstable, unreliable and incorrect.

My greatest fault is that I am no longer a child

The child--a skilled actor with a hundred masks: a different one for his mother, father, grandmother or grandfather, for a stern or lenient teacher, for the cook or maid, for his own friends, for the rich and poor. Naive and cunning, humble and haughty, gentle and vengeful, well behaved and willful, he disguises himself so well that he can lead us by the nose.

Don't try to become a teacher overnight with psychological bookkeeping in your heart and educational theory in your head.

The soul of a child is as complicated and full of contradictions as our soul is.

You will go on blundering, for only he who does nothing avoids errors.

Man feels and ponders death as though it were the end, when in fact death is merely the continuation of life. It is another life. You may not believe in the existence of the soul, yet you must acknowledge that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. For you are, after all, water and dust.

Take a look at the world and laugh

There are insights that can be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious. Seek [within] the undiscovered part of yourself. (emphasis added)

If you are watching fanatically over the morality of your children you may yourself be not completely in order.

Children, being small and weak, have little market value.

Life is a circus ring, with some moments more spectacular than others.

I have signed a pact with life: we will not get in each other's way

The lives of great men are like legends-difficult but beautiful.

To demand that others should provide you textbook prognoses is like asking a strange woman to give birth to your baby. There are insights that can be born only of your own pain, and they are the most precious.

Life never gives more than partial liberation. Achievement can never be more than fragmentary.

If I had means, I would like to spend half a year in Palestine in order to contemplate what has been, and half a year in Poland in order to preserve what remains.

I am well versed in reading the pages of war.

Are decent people in positions of leadership eternally condemned to Calvary?