[31] "In each construction the whole of the materials must be used; or at least each separate piece must be arranged so as to stand in some actual relation to the whole. While this awakens the thinking spirit, it also strengthens and elevates the imagination; because amidst so much variety, the underlying unity is made visibly apparent."—Froebel's Letters, tr. by Michaelis and Moore, page 72.
[32] "The idea of separation gained here in concrete form becomes typical of that condition which must always exist in any growth—the seed breaks through its coverings, and seems to divide itself into distinct parts, each having its function in the growth of the whole plant." (Alice H. Putnam.)
[33] "If we want to educate children, we must be children with them ourselves." (Martin Luther.)
[34] "What must we furnish to the child after the self-contained ball, after the hard sphere, every part of which is similar, and after the single solid cube? It must be something firm which can be easily pulled apart by the child's strength, and just as easily put together again. Therefore it must also be something which is simple, yet multiform; and what should this be, after what we have perceived up to this point, and in view of what the surrounding world affords us, but the cube divided through the centre by three planes perpendicular to one another."—Froebel's Pedagogics.
[35] "Unmaking is as important as making to the child. His destructive energy is as essential to him as his power of construction." (W. T. Harris.)
"The child wishes to discover the inside of the thing, being urged to this by an impulse he has not given to himself,—the impulse which, rightly recognized and rightly guided, seeks to know God in all his works.... Where can the child seek for satisfaction of his impulse to research but from the thing itself?"—Friedrich Froebel, Education of Man.
[36] "An element which slumbers like a viper under roses is that which is now so frequently provided as a plaything for children; it is, in a word, the already too complex and ornate, too finished toy. The child can begin no new thing with it, cannot produce enough variety by means of it; his power of creative imagination, his power of giving outward form to his own idea, are thus actually deadened."—Froebel's Pedagogics.
[37] "One of the greatest and most universal delights of children is to construct for themselves a habitation of some sort, either in the garden or indoors, where chairs have generally to serve their purpose. Instinct leads them, as it does all animals, to procure shelter and protection for their persons, individual outward self-existence and independence."—Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow, Child and Child Nature.
[38] "The building or piling up is with the child, as with the development of the human race, and as with the fixed forms in Nature, the first."—Froebel's Education of Man.
"Towers, pyramids, up, up, connecting themselves with something high, voicing aspiration."