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

Janusz Korczak

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.

Janusz Korczak

taken children people

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.

Janusz Korczak

duty men world

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.

Janusz Korczak

eye feelings way

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.

Janusz Korczak

butterfly wings beautiful

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

Janusz Korczak

today children people

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

Janusz Korczak

dare-to-dream dare dream

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

Janusz Korczak

unstable violence pressure

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.

Janusz Korczak

mother teacher children

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.

Janusz Korczak

dust men believe

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

Janusz Korczak

soul complicated children

My greatest fault is that I am no longer a child

Janusz Korczak

faults children

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)

Janusz Korczak

born pain identity

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

Janusz Korczak

educational heart teacher

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

Janusz Korczak

errors goes-on doe

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

Janusz Korczak

may order children

Take a look at the world and laugh

Janusz Korczak

laughing looks world

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

Janusz Korczak

weak littles children

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.

Janusz Korczak

pain baby giving

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

Janusz Korczak

legends beautiful men

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

Janusz Korczak

pact way