Parenting & Family Quote by Eberhard Arnold

Wonder, for Arnold, is not a mood but a moral discipline. “Only those who look with the eyes of children” sets a hard gate: childlike perception isn’t sentimental innocence, it’s a trained receptivity. Children stare without immediately converting what they see into a tool, a status marker, or an argument. They don’t just notice; they yield. That’s why the verb choice matters: to “lose themselves” is to risk the ego’s usual command center, the adult reflex to manage experience rather than be managed by it.

The subtext carries a quiet indictment of modern adulthood: the world becomes an inventory. Objects get flattened into functions, and even the sublime is treated like content to be consumed, explained, or posted. Arnold is pushing back against that acquisitive gaze. Wonder requires surrender, not mastery. You don’t “have” awe; it has you. The line also smuggles in a theological claim: true attention is a kind of prayer, a decentering that makes room for God (or grace, or meaning) to appear without being forced into your preexisting categories.

Context sharpens the stakes. Arnold, a German theologian and co-founder of the Bruderhof movement, wrote amid the mechanized violence and ideological hardening of early 20th-century Europe. In a culture intoxicated by power, efficiency, and certainty, “eyes of children” becomes a counter-politics: humility against domination, presence against propaganda. The “object of their wonder” isn’t merely a pretty thing; it’s creation itself, encountered as gift rather than resource. The sentence works because it makes enchantment feel demanding, not decorative: if you want wonder, you have to give up being in charge.