“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child”
A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
Context: Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
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Robert Louis Stevenson118
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894Related quotes
“If the child was helpless, was the grown up person, man or woman, in a much better position?”
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist
Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter IV, "Laissez - Faire", p. 46.
N. K. Jemisin (1972) American writer
Interviews <br class="br">Source: On how she once perceived fiction in “NK Jemisin: 'It’s easier to get a book set in black Africa published if you're white'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/02/nk-jemisin-its-easier-to-get-a-book-set-in-black-africa-published-if-youre-white in The Guardian (2020 May 2)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 17e
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist
"An Unread Book," introduction to The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (Holt, Rinehart, 1965 edition)
General sources
“A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”
Edward Albee (1928–2016) American playwright
The New York Times (18 September 1966)
“Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”
Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil
Variant: The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play
Source: Beyond Good and Evil
“Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”
Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
Quoted by Hippolytus, Refutation of all heresies, IX, 9, 4 (Fragment 52), as translated in Reality (1994), by Carl Avren Levenson and Jonathan Westphal, p. 10
Variants:
History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.
As quoted in Contemporary Literature in Translation (1976), p. 21
A lifetime is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.
As quoted in The Beginning of All Wisdom: Timeless Advice from the Ancient Greeks (2003) by Steven Stavropoulos, p. 95
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
As quoted in Fragments (2001) translated by Brooks Haxton
Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.
As quoted in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979) translated by Charles H. Kahn
“In the child, we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently.”
Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general
To Leon Goldensohn, March 1, 1946, after Goldensohn asks Ohlendorf, "How did you figure a six month old Jewish infant must be killed - was it an enemy? Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.