Parenting & Family Quote by Friedrich Schiller

Schiller gives you a dare that sounds like a pep talk, then quietly turns it into an artistic manifesto. “Err” and “dream” are paired as twin acts of disobedience: error implies risk, social embarrassment, the failure that polite Enlightenment culture tried to sand down; dreaming implies a refusal to accept the world as finished. Put together, they sketch the posture of the dramatist and, more broadly, the free citizen Schiller wanted to cultivate - someone willing to look foolish in public for the sake of a larger truth.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “Deep meaning” isn’t located in official institutions - courts, churches, treatises - but in “childish plays,” the very activities adults dismiss as unserious. Schiller’s subtext is pointed: if you want moral and political renewal, you don’t get it by lecturing people into virtue. You get it through imaginative rehearsal. Play is where humans practice freedom without immediate punishment, where roles can be tried on, rules bent, identities scrambled. That’s not escapism; it’s training.

Context matters here. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution’s promise and terror, Schiller became skeptical of brute political solutions. His answer was aesthetic: cultivate inner liberty and ethical feeling through art and “play” (anticipating his later idea of the Spieltrieb, the play-drive). The line flatters the child, yes, but it’s really aimed at the adult who has learned to confuse seriousness with wisdom - and has forgotten that the deepest commitments often begin as games we were brave enough to take seriously.