"Adolescence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The air is deep azure and red gold. It fits the time; it fits the age; it fits the present spirit of the nations. The nineteenth century wantons in its giant adolescence; the Titan boy uproots mountains in his game, and hurls rocks in his wild sport. This summer Bonaparte is in the saddle; he and his host scour Russian deserts. He has with him Frenchmen and Poles, Italians and children ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... yet another area of literature at which Chesterton excelled. A fun-loving and gregarious man, he was nevertheless troubled in his adolescence by thoughts of suicide. In Christianity he found the answers to the dilemmas and paradoxes he saw in life. Other books in that same series include his 1908 Orthodoxy (written in response to attacks on this book) ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Gradually the idea has grown that what Rev. Sylvester Judd called "the birthright church" is the true one, and that it is desirable that all children should be religiously trained, and admitted to the church at the age of adolescence. Mr. Judd gave noble utterance to this conception of a church in a series of sermons published after his death,[6] as well as in a sermon prepared for the Thursday lecture in Boston.[7] The same idea was elaborated by Rev. Cyrus A. Bartol in his Church ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... down into the advanced nations, living on the continents animated by the "life-wave," whilst the less evolved go to form the so-called degenerate races vegetating in obscure parts of the world. Look now at the adolescence of Russia, the youth of America, the old age of France, and the decrepitude of Turkey. Look backwards at the glorious Egypt of bygone ages; nothing remains but deserts of sand on which imperishable structures still ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... that bare, dust-laden room, with the two candles burning at her elbows, sat Alix. There were tears in her eyes, a wistful little smile on her lips. She was reading again the clumsy lines David had written in those long-ago days of adolescence. Now they meant something to her. They were stilted, commonplace expressions; she would have laughed at them had they been written by any one else, and she still would have been vastly amused, even now, were it not for ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... his wanderings, wherever may have been his birth, who watches with anxiety the recovery of the Arts, and acknowledges the supremacy of Genius. Besides, it is in Italy at last that all our few friends are resident. Yours were left behind you at Paris in your adolescence, if indeed any friendship can exist between a Florentine and a Frenchman: mine at Avignon were Italians, and older for the most part than myself. Here we know that we are beloved by some, and esteemed by many. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... fifteen years of age, Ibsen was confirmed and taken away from school. These events marked the beginning of adolescence with a young middle-class Norwegian of those days, for whom the future proposed no task in life demanding a more elaborate education than the local schoolmaster could give. Ibsen announced his wish to be ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... throughout, even when these are of the gravest kind, like robbery and murder. Rather may it be said that every age has its specific criminality, and this is the case especially with criminaloids. On the borderland between childhood and adolescence, there seems to be a kind of instinctive tendency to law-breaking, which by immature minds is often held to be a sign of virility. The Italian novelist and poet Manzoni describes this idea very well in his Promessi Sposi, when speaking of the half-witted lad Gervaso, who "because ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... succession of events, not as separate units, but as links of one vast chain, on every one of which is inscribed a phrase discoursing of the progress of the human race, and showing the growth of man in the complex, from infancy to adolescence. Further than that, we can hardly venture to believe the race has yet advanced. Thus studied, history is the noblest of all sciences, since it treats of the highest of God's creations; but studied as ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... was becoming. By such preliminary exercises the boy was being prepared for the conflict which awaited him in more advanced[159] age; and already in his own person he was challenging the adversary. Such, then, was the boyhood of Malachy. Moreover he passed through his adolescence with like simplicity and purity; except that as years increased, there increased also for him wisdom and ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... of a new world for her. At any moment the chances of death may make the wife a widow, may sweep out of existence all that she had made fundamental in her life, may enrich her with insurance profits or hurl her into poverty, and restore all the drifting expectancy of her adolescence.... ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Ambassador Theatre in New York. George and Terry are the son and daughter of Professor and Mrs. McIntyre who struggle valiantly to lead their children through the difficult phases of adolescence, so familiar to us all. Terry is shown outgrowing the tomboy stage, and unable to play with the boys on an equal status. She finds herself thrown back on her feminine resources; and how she tries out ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... way children will develop ideals in imitation of what goes on around them. Every child is likely at some time in his career to look forward to money-making as the most desirable end in life; but most normal children will pass beyond this ideal before adolescence. If, however, the atmosphere in which the child lives is one of money-getting, the child without strong tendencies toward other ideals is likely to allow this ideal to persist into adolescence and young manhood or womanhood. In such cases the ideal becomes fixed without indicating that the individual ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... boy, stumbling blindly, almost savagely through the maze of adolescence, with no guide, nobody to warn or counsel him, nothing to stimulate his pride, no ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... project and body forth? Has any true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as he himself said apropos of the Child's Garden, he could 'speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... single-heartedness, and such chimerical stuff—the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show me a woman howling out her life on my ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... boy that he suffered that shock of horrified outrage and grief at the death of Cordelia that prevented him from rereading the scene until be came to edit the play. Johnson's deepest feelings and convictions, Professor Clifford has recently reminded us, can be traced back to his childhood and adolescence. But it is surprising to learn, as one does from his commentary, that other scenes in these very plays (Hamlet and King Lear, and in Macbeth, too) leave him unmoved, if one can so interpret the absence ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... among biologists, President G. Stanley Hall, has lived to see his faith in the practical importance of the intensive study of childhood and adolescence justified by radical reforms in school and home. Hall should be revered by all lovers of youth as the apostle to adolescents. The other, Professor William McDougall, has done much to convince the thinking world that all of the social sciences and technologies must be grounded ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the audiences, too, suggests that inexpensiveness alone cannot be decisive. Six years ago a keen sociological observer characterized the patrons of the picture palaces as "the lower middle class and the massive public, youths and shopgirls between adolescence and maturity, small dealers, pedlars, laborers, charwomen, besides the small quota of children." This would be hardly a correct description today. This "lower middle class" has long been joined by the upper middle class. To be sure, our observer of that long forgotten past added meekly: "Then there ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... women alike were charmed by him. He became a virtuoso in love and had a genius for friendship. But he was not always cheerful. In his youth, particularly, he was often moody and given to brooding over indefinable woes. He suffered acutely at times from what is now called the melancholia of adolescence. This was a phase of that emotional sensitiveness and nervous instability which are nearly always a part of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... are permitted to enter the august presence of their parents, they are often treated with a combination of tolerant affection and imperial severity. Small wonder the little ones in their development to adolescence evade giving confidences that have neither been asked for nor encouraged. They have to learn the great secrets of life and of nature from either bitter experience or from the lips of strangers. Children and parents grow up apart. It often takes a convulsion of nature or a devastating scandal ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... development of children, from birth till adulthood, has provided material in recent years for what has come to be regarded as almost a distinct part of comparative anthropological or sociological science, and the literature of adolescence (q.v.) and of "child-study" in its various aspects has attained considerable proportions. In England the British Child Study Association was founded in 1894, its official organ being the Paidologist, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the shock would have been too much to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber. But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but slept open-eyed, and ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... VIOLET HUNT tells it, there is really nothing very much to charm in a history of three disagreeable children developing into detestable young women. Perhaps it may have some value as a study of feminine adolescence, but I defy anyone to call the result attractive. Its chief incident, which is (not to mince matters) the attempted seduction by Christina of a middle-aged man, the father of one of her friends, mercifully comes to nothing. I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... infancy to old age as a member of church or chapel without once receiving any first-hand teaching on the powers and needs of the soul or the technique of prayer; or obtaining any more help in the great religious difficulties of adolescence than a general invitation to believe, and trust God. Morality—that is to say correctness of response to our neighbour and our temporal surroundings—is often well taught. Spirituality—correctness of response to God and our eternal surroundings—is ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... "And beside it is Keola, slain ere his time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone abides near to him. To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than to aught else. I became possessed of them in the period of my culminating adolescence. I know they changed the entire course of my life and trend of my mind. They gave to me a modesty and a humility in the world, from which my father's fortune has ever failed to ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... untroubled in the freshness of adolescence, she rode on, straight before her, symbolic innocence leading the disillusioned. And he followed, hard, dry eyes narrowing, ever narrowing and flinching under the smiling gaze of the dark-eyed, red-mouthed ghost that sat there on ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a girl is lighter than a boy at birth, on the average she gains in weight faster and is heavier at twelve than a boy of the same age. She also gains faster in height, and for a few years in early adolescence is taller than a boy of the same age. Of course, boys catch up and finally become much taller and heavier than girls. Similarly, a girl's mind develops faster than the mind of a boy, as shown in ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... inevitable, tiring both with its earnestness and its utter absence of a common ground. Because in him apparently remained every vital germ of convention and of generations of training in every precept of formality; and in her—for with Valerie West adolescence had arrived late—that mystery had been responsible for far-reaching disturbances consequent on the starved years of self-imprisonment, of exaltations suppressed, of fears and doubts and vague desires and dreams ineffable possessing the silence ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... at sixteen; there we have Mozarts, composers at three; there we have our inspired boy preachers already consecrated to their great ideal of work; and we have also our Jesse Pomeroys, fiendish murderers before adolescence. I believe with Carlyle that it is the heroes, the geniuses of the race, to whom we owe its achievements; and the hero and the genius are the men and women of "greatest variability" in powers. The ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... his ambition, At first his ambition was of a low type, that of the child which desires to acquire possessions and power simply for himself. In the child this impulse is perfectly natural. In the normally developed individual, during the years of early adolescence (the years of 14 to 16) the social and altruistic impulses begin to develop and to take the place of those which are purely egoistic or selfish. When the fully developed man fails, as did Jacob, to leave behind childish things and retains the ambitions and impulses of ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... separated himself entirely from the "Solitaires" during the years of his brilliant career as poet and courtier, there remained always in his heart a latent tenderness for the quiet green valley of the Chevreuse, where he had passed all his years of adolescence, listening to the good Fathers, and imbibing their doctrines of the necessity of divine grace to complete the character. His masters were horrified and distressed when his talent developed into plays, which brought him into contact with actors ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... of moral life and with the goodnesses partly of civil and partly of spiritual life, which are the external of life even with the evil. An infant is born into this external life and is therefore lovable, but coming to boyhood and adolescence he passes from that external to the inner life and at length to his father's ruling love. If this has been evil and not been moderated and bent by various means by his teachers, it becomes his ruling love as it was his father's. Still ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... affectionate but puzzled inspection of the old nurse. In her mind, residence amongst the "Wild Boars," service in an army, travel and adventure generally during an absence of five years, as well as emergence from adolescence into manhood, accounted for much change in physical appearance, but not sufficiently for the extraordinary change in morale: the contrast between the vicious, untidy, selfish, insolent boy that had gone off to London with ill-concealed glee in 1896 and this grave-mannered, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... common consent of philosophers and physicians, mental imbecility in the extreme degree is termed idiotcy; and this state may exist "ex nativitate," or supervene at various periods of human life. When a child proceeds from infancy to adolescence, and from that state advances to maturity, with a capacity of acquiring progressively the knowledge which will enable him to conduct himself in society and to manage his affairs,—so that he is viewed as a responsible agent ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam
... not responsible for more deviations from the path of rectitude than even the offenders themselves imagine. Callow youth just from college is susceptible to many kinds of flattery, and at the age of adolescence the appeal which lovely woman ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... junction we made another meeting of yet more account. For there we were joined by the Aisne, already a far-travelled river and fresh out of Champagne. Here ended the adolescence of the Oise; this was his marriage-day; thenceforward he had a stately, brimming march, conscious of his own dignity and sundry dams. He became a tranquil feature in the scene. The trees and towns saw themselves in him, as in a mirror. He carried the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... herself to the duties of a wife and mother. The only serious grief she and her husband had experienced was the loss of two young children. Edouard, though delicate from his birth, had nevertheless passed the trying years of infancy and early adolescence; he was them nearly fourteen. With a sweet and rather effeminate expression, blue eyes and a pleasant smile, he was a striking likeness of his mother. His father's affection exaggerated the dangers which threatened the boy, and in his eyes the slightest indisposition became a serious malady; his ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... spontaneity and reverential labour of an age of more avowed adolescence has disappeared, there is yet lacking the justness of phrase and certainty of grammar and rime, which later supply, however inadequately, the place of poetic enthusiasm. The defects of the style, with its commonplace exaggeration of conceits, the thumbed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... disturbed in her mind. Jim had not talked to her like this for five years. Ever since that long, happy summer when he and she had been together nearly every day, when he had made love to her in his slow, rather ponderous way, and she, her adolescence flattered, had said "yes" when he had asked her to marry him—or rather ever since he had written to her from Oxford to say that he must wait for some years before he could expect to marry and that she was to consider herself quite free—he had never by word or sign shown whether he also ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... of this sort are often accompanied by international unrest—because of the normal ebullience of national adolescence and the desire to be accepted by the world community, as well as a variety of ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... "What a Boy Should Know," and "What a Girl Should Know," are invaluable during this critical time. This sudden ripening of the sex instinct is the cause of the metamorphosis from childhood to early manhood and womanhood, and is the key which explains the changes that characterize adolescence. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... up to adolescence pretty straight and clean," said Sir Richmond. "What stands out in my memory now is this idea, of a sort of woman goddess who was very lovely and kind and powerful and wonderful. That ruled my secret imaginations as a boy, but it was very much in my ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Ishmael, then paused. Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse |
