There is so much woman in many a girl and too much boy in many a man.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mokokoma Mokhonoana Adolescence Adolescent Adult Adulthood Aphorism Aphorisms Babyish Boy Boyhood Boyhoods Boys Childish Childishness Develop Development Foolish Girl Girlhood Girlhoods Girls Humor Humour Immature Immaturity Inane Infantile Irresponsibility Irresponsible Jejune Juvenile Man Mature Maturity Men Quotation Quotations Quote Quotes Responsibilities Responsibility Responsible Satire Silly Woman Women

I also think of those daily slaughters along the highways, of that death that is as horrible as it is banal and that bears no resemblance to cancer or AIDS because, as the work not of nature but of man, it is an almost voluntary death. How can it be that such a death fails to dumbfound us, to turn our lives upside down, to incite us to vast reforms? No, it does not dumbfound us, because like Pasenow, we have a poor sense of the real, and in the sur-real sphere of symbols, this death in the guise of a handsome car actually represents life; this smiling death is con-fused with modernity, freedom, adventure, just as Elisabeth was con-fused with the Virgin. This death of a man condemned to capital punishment, though infinitely rarer, much more readily draws our attention, rouses passions: confounded with the image of the executioner, it has a symbolic voltage that is far stronger, far darker and more repellent. Et cetera.Man is a child wandering lost—to cite Baudelaire`s poem again—in the forests of symbols.(The criterion of maturity: the ability to resist symbols. But mankind grows younger all the time.)

~ Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera Adolescence Baudelaire Capital Punishment Childhood Confusion Death Death Penalty Infantile Maturity Motor Vehicle Accident Real Reality Sign Signification Surreal Symbolism

Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.

~ Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles Antiquity Boyhood Civilization Colonialism Cultural Hegemony Domestication French Morocco Human Development Infantile Origins Progress Western Civilization

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

~ John Lithgow

John Lithgow Academics Senses Infantile