Adults Quotes

That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, The children are the hope of the future. And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.

~ Peter David

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

We use Halloween to scare the kids and bankers to scare the adults.

~ Anthony T Hincks

Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?

~ Rick Riordan

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

~ Michael Ende

The average adult has had sex innumerable times more than they have formed an opinion of their own.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Most adults are knowledgeable to a child, but ignorant for their age.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is a healthy approach not to expect persons to turn out precisely how you would have wished.

~ Criss Jami

...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.

~ Orson Scott Card

The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.

~ Catherine Lacey

[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.

~ Robert Epstein

Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.

~ Neil Gaiman

The average adult hates being treated like a child, unless it suits them.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?

~ John Green

Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give permission to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.

~ Mildred Armstrong Kalish

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

~ Maurice Sendak

Though the children did not know Levin well and did not remember when they had last seen him, they did not feel towards him any of that strange shyness and antagonism so often felt by children towards grown-up people who 'pretend,' which causes them to suffer as painfully. Pretence about anything sometimes deceives the wisest and shrewdest man, but, however cunningly it is hidden, a child of the meanest capacity feels it and is repelled by it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

~ Peter De Vries

Magic? What did magic have to do with breaking into someone's store and stealing their stuff?Don't you get it? Peter said. You're free now. You don't have to live by their rules anymore. Peter pointed into the inky blackness of the basement. The darkness is calling. A little danger, a little risk. Feel your heart race, listen to it. That's the sound of being alive. It's your time, Nick. Your one chance to have fun before it's all stolen by them, the adults, with their cruelty and endless rules, their can't-do-this, and can't-do-that's, their have-tos, and better-dos, their little boxes and cages all designed to break your spirit, to kill your magic.

~ Brom

Moral obligations verses Legal obligations. Legally, you must abide by the laws of the land or face the consequences of being fined, imprisoned or both. Moral obligations tend to lean more towards a spiritual nature of a person. Some people perform immoral acts because legally there are no consequences. Morals birth in the heart of the individual. Moral characteristics are developed at an early age and continue into adulthood. It's a disgrace to neglect having good moral character.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Not only should we encourage kids to daydream, but also to jump-in and build those dreams. Dreaming is largely lost among adults drowning in self-imposed realities.

~ Ryan Lilly

Let's teach that loving isn't always loving. Like when you loved the hamster so much that it died. Some adults do that too. Too much, the wrong way. These are 'Stay away' zones on your body. These are 'Stay away' people. You don't have to obey all adults. Not even parents. Disagree respectfully. Run, if you need. Shout, if you need. Adults can be bad too.

~ Deborah Ainslie

If you're adult enough to have sex, you're adult enough to talk about your feelings.

~ Carter Quinn

I catch sight of Janice. Her eyes are so full of excitement that I half expect her to jump up and down. This is something she'll never forget, I tell myself. As an old lady with all the spirit knocked out of her and nobody believe in she'll remember a happy day in July when a horny young guy strutted his stuff and made her heart beat fast.

~ Eric Bishop-Potter

A rebel adult often seems like a glorious savior, whereas a rebel child often seems like a little devil.

~ Criss Jami

You and I both know that love is for children,'' he said. ''We're adults. Compatibility is for adults.''''Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,'' Teresa replied. ''Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my bluetooth feel like shit.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.

~ Kelli Jae Baeli

Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because he's with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.

~ Paul Murray

The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.

~ Aurora Levins Morales

I would like to do more in appreciating the mindset of the child. Maybe it has something to do with taking ourselves very seriously and with great disregard, as well as having a healthy does of awe and doubt for all else.

~ Meia Geddes

Generally it appears the case that, when faced with all life's problems, the baby, he wants to cry about everything, the child wants to question everything, the teenager wants to rebel against everything, the young adult wants to solve everything, the middle-aged adult wants to protect everything, and the elder wants to accept everything.

~ Criss Jami

Spiritual maturity is not measured by the years that you have spent in church, rather by your attitude before people different from you.

~ Paul Gitwaza

It is the mystery of the unknownThat fascinates us; we are children stillWayward and wistful; with one hand we clingTo the familiar things we call our own,And with the other, resolute of will,Grope in the dark for what the day will bring

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A child thinks and acts like a child. But when you are grown, you act and think like an adult. Too many people are still childish and immature and fail to realize it's a setback in their lives.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

~ Elena Ferrante

As adults we get so entrapped in illusions and trivia, that we forget the true essence of life; and so often we need to connect with children, to understand that it is the little, priceless joys that make life beautiful and worthy.

~ Manprit Kaur

I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies...

~ Neil Gaiman

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths

~ Neil Gaiman