Parenting & Family Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A bracing rebuke to the parental fantasy of control, Goethe’s line treats childrearing less as a craft project than as an encounter with radical otherness. The verb “fashion” is doing the heavy lifting: it calls up the artist’s studio, the sculptor’s hands, the Enlightenment-era faith that character can be engineered with enough technique and will. Goethe, a writer who spent his life tracking the unruly forces of temperament, desire, and nature, is warning that this impulse to mold a child into a private wish-fulfillment is not just futile but morally misshapen.

The sentence pivots on a hard “cannot” into a sterner “must,” swapping parental preference for obligation. “Have them and love them” is almost austerely plain, as if to insist that the essential labor is not optimization but attachment without prerequisites. Then comes the most loaded clause: “as God has given them.” In Goethe’s cultural moment, that appeal does double duty. It’s theological, yes, but it’s also a way of putting limits on human sovereignty. You don’t own a child the way you own a tool; you receive a person, with their own grain, their own future, their own resistance to your narrative.

The subtext lands cleanly in any era anxious about “potential.” Goethe isn’t romanticizing neglect or dismissing guidance; he’s puncturing the covert narcissism that can hide inside “high expectations.” Love, here, is not the reward for conformity. It’s the discipline of seeing what’s actually in front of you, not what would flatter your desires.