Adult

“ Touching as are the little children deprived of opportunity for wholesome play, a deeper compassion stirred our hearts when we began [74] to realize the critically tender age at which many of them share the experiences, anxieties, and tragedies of the adult. ”

“ The differences of capacity, experience and habit involved in the difference between the child and adult will, of course, introduce many dissimilarities into their manifestations of the mirthful temper. ”

“ Fortunately, in many instances, as the child's work as been to play; the adult's work world, his world of responsibility is lived, experienced by him, to an extent as play—it gives satisfaction and pleasure. ”

“ In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. ”

“ Then there is adolescence with all its moodiness, questions, fears, and experimenting related to adult modes of being. The moods are a mystery and the questions often unanswerable or the answers contradictory. ”

“ In due time he entered the period expressively designated, ‘The monster age.’ This is the time when expanding young life has outgrown the tenderness of infancy and failed of putting on manly and womanly graces; a time when there is a mighty ambition to put on the characteristics of adult life and a mighty lack of ability gracefully to wear them. ”

“ Where the conscience of the parent has only been awakened late in life to this high duty to the child, the attempt to approach the subject with the young adult is often deeply resented by both boy and girl. ”

“ Great importance attaches, therefore, from the point of view of mental efficiency and stability in adult life, to the influences which control the development of the conative trends during childhood and adolescence. ”

“ The feeling is rather common that human experience becomes rich only as the adult period is reached; that childhood is comparatively barren of needs, and valuable mainly as a period of storage of knowledge to meet wants that will arise later. Yet is this true? By the time the adult state is reached, one has passed through the principal kinds of experience; the period of struggle is largely over, and the results have registered themselves in habits. The adult is to a great extent a bundle of habits. ”

“ One adult, then, remains in this world. Except to say that he is two hundred years old and full of knowledge, and that he endured the long journey without serious ill effects, she has told me little about him. ”

“ In adult life for casual and random activity is substituted activity directed by some end or purpose which determines the responses called into play. Professional and business, domestic and social enterprises and obligations take up most of the adult's energy. The contrast between the play of the child and the work of the adult is that in the case of the former actions are done for their own sake ”

“ Indirect evidence that early human nature differed from later human nature, by having this extreme emotional variability, is yielded us by the contrast between the child and the adult among ourselves. ”

“ From this age to the condition of adult life, the intellectual faculties develop according to the surroundings of the individual, while, on the emotional side, reverence, remorse, and courtesy make their appearance at about the age of five years, and melancholy and ecstasy at about the tenth year. ”

“ I mean the specialization of aims and habits in the adult, compared with the absence of specialization in the child, and the connection of undifferentiated status with the full and free growth of the child.
The adult is primarily a person with a certain calling and position in life. These devolve upon him certain specific responsibilities which he has to meet, and call into play certain formed habits. The child is primarily one whose calling is growth. ”

“ All that an adult can claim is a continuation, or an amplification of thoughts, dormant in his youth. Although a child's brain can absorb instruction with an ability far surpassing that of a grown man ”

“ I bring this up because there's often an assumption on days like today that growing up is purely a function of age; that becoming an adult is an inevitable progression that can be measured by a series of milestones - college graduation or your first job or the first time you throw a party that actually has food too. ”

“ Children, if they could express themselves articulately and sincerely, would tell a different tale; and there is excellent adult authority for the conviction that for certain moral and intellectual purposes adults must become as little children. ”

“ To hold one's sleeping baby, watch one's children take their first tottering steps and hear them say their first words, boast with pride about their first home run or first music recital, and witness firsthand their journey into adulthood—these are some of the most precious rewards of parenthood. ”

“ The Defective Children.—Not those who die young, full of promise, to leave a memory of exquisite budding loveliness cut short by untimely frosts, but those who live on from infancy to 206childhood and from youth to physical maturity and even on to old age, yet never become responsible adults—these are the children we must consider. ”

“ Then when I considered the duties of the profession, and firmly determined to carry out all these duties, I also saw the degenerate condition of youth, and the many wrongs of this world by which adults spoil and distress youth. ”

“ It is needless to say that a large part of this suffering could be averted by knowledge on the part of the parents and of other adults with whom the youth comes in contact, as well as on the part of the youth himself. ”

“ Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is attained through some special attitude or general ability enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction, assume the professional attitude and the responsibility of adulthood at an early age. ”

“ X. Adulteries of the third degree are adulteries of the reason, which are committed by those who with the understanding confirm themselves in the persuasion that they are not evils of sin. XI. The adulteries committed by such persons are grievous, and are imputed to them according to confirmations. XII. Adulteries of the fourth degree are adulteries of the will, which are committed by those who make them lawful and pleasing, and who do not think them of importance enough, to consult the understanding respecting them. ”

“ While I am dwelling upon this, and tracing out the gradual change from infancy to youth, from youth to perfect growth, from that to age, and thinking, with an old man’s pride, that she is comely yet, I feel a slight thin hand upon my arm, and, looking down, see seated at my feet a crippled boy,—a gentle, patient child,—whose aspect I know well. ”

“ Therefore it is not wonderful that you, endowed as you were with all the qualities of a good child, with obedience, innocence, love of learning, modesty, and with harmless merriment, should have been the joy and delight of your parents and teachers, a spectacle to God, to angels, and to men! Yes, fair and golden were the days of your first youth, which you spent under the parental roof, beneath an unclouded sky. ”

“ I would satisfy their desire, chattering as eagerly as the children themselves, and often, in spite of the self-assurance of youth and the ridiculous pride which it takes in the miserable crumbs of worldly wisdom it possesses, I would feel like a twenty-year-old child in a conclave of sages. ”

“ Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant frolic someness of their years. ”

“ The adolescent stage of life has long seemed to me one of the most fascinating of all themes, more worthy, perhaps, than anything in the world of reverence, most inviting study, and in most crying need of a service we do not yet understand how to render aright. ”

“ When one reaches the age of fifteen years, one has said farewell to the pastimes of childhood; one has come to look upon them as trifling and ephemeral, as one would the actions of children building houses of cards or sand castles. At thirty, one has begun to put behind one the consuming pleasures of passionate youth. ”

“ The culture of young minds, in their more advanced stages, has indeed been entrusted to me, and I have loved the office. But never before, have I been so blest, as to nurture the infant, when as a germ quickened by Spring, it opens the folding-doors of its little heart, and puts forth the thought, the preference, the affection, like filmy radicles, or timid tendrils, seeking where to twine. ”

“ You have certain tastes, habits, hopes and desires cultivated through years of experience and education. The child has a young mind to be expanded and developed, a young body to be molded into lines of grace and charm, a young life to be made fine and beautiful. ”

“ I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a child. ”

“ Age tempers youth. Youth animates age. The senior with refined experience, the junior with the flush and fervour of opening life, conjoined in pastoral work, must surely to all appear a beautiful ideal. ”

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ The young are growing up to maturity, the old dropping into their graves; but the infant of her affections ever remains an infant—her charge in middle life, when all her other children have left her and gone out into the world, and, amid the weakness of decay and decrepitude, the child of her old age. ”

“ And it was not so much mere picture of youth and age ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically divining it. ”

“ Only after I had observed that several very fair persons, who happened, to pass near me, had gray hair, did I notice that the bloom of youth still glows upon the faces of those who are 35 to 40 years of age! ”

“ So also between youth and age there will be found differences of seeking, which are not wrong, nor of false choice in either, but of different temperament, the youth sympathizing more with the gladness, fulness, and magnificence of things, and the gray hairs with their completion, sufficiency and repose. ”

“ Characterization of the age from eight to twelve—The era of recapitulating the stages of primitive human development—Life close to nature—The age also for drill, habituation, memory, work and regermination—Adolescence superposed upon this stage of life, but very distinct from it. ”

“ The years of adolescence in the male are characterised by an impulse to travel, to adventures, but in addition to all kinds of ideal efforts and to religious activity. The loftiest ethical ideas alternate with a self-conscious bumptiousness. ”

“ During this protracted period the old gentleman listened with the meekness and modesty of a child—as if he were adding new information to the stores of his own mind, or perhaps he was observing, with philosophic eye, the faculties of the youthful mind and how new energies are evolved by repeated action ”

“ And oh, youth!—take my word of it—youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepit, ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming hedgerows. ”

“ Youth is so pretty, so fresh, so engaging, so full of poetry and romance and gaiety! And once youth is gone, when there are lines on the brow, and memories in the heart, and graves in the past, how shall the interest of the story 291be kept up—the reader led on to follow the path of maid, or wife, or widow into middle age? ”

“ So it is with the human being: the character and habit are directed easily in infancy, with difficulty during childhood, but they are well-nigh impossible of direction by the time adolescence is established. ”

“ What but youth can echo back the soul of youth—all the music of its wild vanities and romantic follies? The good nurse did not sympathize with the sentiments of her young lady, but she sympathised with the deep earnestness with which they were expressed. ”

“ We stood to each other from boyhood upwards in every possible relation, whether of an educational, warlike, delicate, or social character, which the warm and fitful feelings peculiar to boyhood and youth can produce. ”