Korczak Quotes

#1. Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. x. "adhesions,

Diane Ackerman

#2. Back in 1948, a monomaniac called Korczak resolved to impose Crazy Horse's likeness upon a mountain. It took 50 years to complete the head, which measures 90ft from crown to chin. By comparison, the four presidents at Mt Rushmore seem modest.

Clive Sinclair

#3. We climb mountains because the valleys are full of cemeteries. The secret of survival is to climb, even in the dark, even when the climb seems pointless. The climb, not the summit, is the thing. And the great don't just climb mountains, they carve them as they go. Korczak

Richard Paul Evans

#4. Life bites like a dog.

Janusz Korczak

#5. I am well versed in reading the pages of war.

Janusz Korczak

#6. Uh, oh. This room is big but not big enough to share with angry, smoking dragons.

Eunice Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#8. My greatest fault is that I am no longer a child

Janusz Korczak

#9. 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

#10. The court does not fly off the handle. It does not shout abuse. It speaks calmly.

Janusz Korczak

#11. 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

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

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#14. My lands are where my dead lie buried.

Korczak Ziolkowski

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

Janusz Korczak

#16. I never realized that a child is capable of remembering so well and of waiting so patiently

Janusz Korczak

#17. 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

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

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#20. Take a look at the world and laugh

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#22. 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.

Janusz Korczak

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. When your life is over, the world will ask you only one question: 'Did you do what you were supposed to do?'

Korczak Ziolkowski

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

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#29. 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

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

Janusz Korczak

#31. To reform the world - means to reform upbringing...

Janusz Korczak

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

Janusz Korczak

#33. When does the loneliness of old age begin?

Janusz Korczak

#34. 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