I recently read a post by the Orang-utan Librarian about how valuable fairy tales are, and this quote immediately came to mind:
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
– Albert Einstein
I am a huge fan of Albert Einstein, and this quote is one of my favorites. For me, it speaks to how important creativity and imagination are. So many inventions that we take for granted today, or credit exclusively to science and math, started out in the imagination. Einstein and da Vinci are both great examples. Imagination makes us great. And I think it’s something we should both instill in younger generations and remind ourselves of as we get older.
What do you think of this quote? Do you think fairy tales are important?
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Do you think he was referring to the Disney style fairy tales or the more brutal predecessors? The older ones certainly have more brutal ways of getting the message across.
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Probably the latter, since Disney didn’t start producing happier fairy tales until the 1930s (though I’m not sure the date of this quote). Since Einstein was born in Germany, I’d imagine he grew up with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I think he was speaking more about encouraging kids to develop imagination. There’s another quote from Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Though I completely agree some of them are pretty brutal. A kiss is much nicer than throwing a frog against a wall. It would be interesting to look at how those fairy tales impacted children vs. how today’s Disney-esque fairy tales influence kids now.
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Thank you so much for your detailed reply!
I think you are right, Einstein was probably referring to imagination. Sorry if I sounded like I was being a smart-ass, it wasn’t intentional.
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Not at all! I always appreciate great questions! And it’s definitely worth mentioning that the fairy tales Einstein was exposed to were pretty different from what most of us encounter as children now.
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I love fairy tales, though sometimes they seem too weird to really empathize with any of the characters. I’ve been doing something new, though, where I actively imagine how it would feel to be one or more of the characters so it’s not just reading one sentence describing how the second son went off and did the exact same thing (and now moving on to the next event 10 years later), but exploring how it might have been different for him or how the third son might have felt differently as he watched the same thing happen again, or whatever details go with the story. But in whatever way people use their imagination to engage with stories I agree that it’s important! (I’m also not going to disagree with Einstein himself…haha.)
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That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Maybe I’ll try it bedtime I read a fairy tale.
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Not long ago, I included this quote in an essay I wrote for school! I do think fairytales are important and that they carry layers of meaning. What someone interprets might not be the same as what someone else interprets. This quote, I feel, reminds people not to take fairytales at surface value, or perhaps to take fairytales at surface value and whatever lies beyond. Good quote!
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Thanks! I agree!
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I think that the point you bring up here is incredibly crucial.Creativity and imagination is what drives our world forward!
Innovation comes from creativity and the ability to imagine something better! To imagine something that could be better — a better economy, a better life, a better way!
Thank you very much for sharing.
I look forward to reading more of your ideas.
Thank you,
Let’s Talk About: Personal Development
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