Explore Quotes by G. Stanley Hall

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.

Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

Dancing is imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonize the feelings and the intellect with the body that supports them

Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development.

Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.

Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.

Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.

Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless.

.. every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.

This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.