327 Quotes About Adults

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

He preferred smart questions to smart answers.

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

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.

When we see an innocent child, this is an ordinary thing; but when we see an innocent adult, this is an extraordinary thing!

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

Things have changed since we were children, perhaps not as much as we might have liked, but the world is a different place. Faster, louder, lonelier. Unlike the world around us, we haven't changed at all, not really. History is a mirror and we're all just older versions of ourselves; children disguised as adults.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk thesame way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs toadults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find thespaces between fences.

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.