Quotes regarding childhood and play

“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

“If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer




“Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.” - Jean de la Bruyere

“What we play is life.” - Louis Armstrong

“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” - Heraclitus

“Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.” - Mark Twain

“You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.” - Warren Beatty

“Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” - Carl Jung

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” - George Bernard Shaw

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.” -Jean Piaget

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor.” - Stuart Brown

“A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him.” - Pablo Neruda

“I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” - Pablo Picasso

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” - Pablo Picasso

Regarding artist Joseph Cornell “His fondest childhood memories included family Christmas celebrations, outings to Manhattan where he saw vaudeville shows and strolled around Times Square, and trips to Coney Island where he encountered penny arcade machines. These childhood memories, among others, inspired some of the themes later explored in his art work.”

"After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well." - Albert Einstein

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” - Albert Einstein

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” - Albert Einstein

“Everything you can imagine is real.” - Pablo Picasso

“Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like?  What games does he love best?  Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand:  "How old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much money does his father make?"  Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943, translated from French