Quotes on Adults

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

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

But as an adult working in the fashion industry, I struggle with materialism. And I'm one of the least materialistic people that exist, because material possessions don't mean much to me. They're beautiful, I enjoy them, they can enhance your life to a certain degree, but they're ultimately not important.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult's life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

Good children's literature appeals not only to the child in the adult, but to the adult in the child.

If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.

I think also, that general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of youth, than from exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think moreover, that talents for the education of youth are the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed, whenever a way is opened for use of them, is as strongly called as if he heard a voice from heaven.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

You do not lose your value or preciousness when you grow to be a adult. You are still that miraculous creation. You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.

Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don't the adult around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

Even when adults do feel their safety to be threatened, we may not be able to see this on the surface. Infants will react in a fashion as if they were endangered, if they are disturbed or dropped suddenly, startled by loud noises, flashing light

Children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect, as equals. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be - The unknown person inside each of them is the hope for the future.

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self. Adults work to finish a task, but the child works in order to grow, and is working to create the adult, the person that is to be. Such experience is not just play... it is work he must do in order to grow up.

All our handling of the child will bear fruit, not only at the moment, but in the adult they are destined to become.