All the high-flown schoolteachers and tutors agree that children do not know why they want; but that grown-ups too tumble around like children on the face of earth, not knowing where they come from or where they are going, acting as little from true purpose, and just as ruled by biscuits and cakes and birch rods: no one really wants to believe that, but it seems to me something you can grasp with your hands.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and Burton Pike. The Sorrows of Young Werther. New York: Modern Library, 2004.