Quotes & Sayings About Manhood

Childhood often holds a truth with its feeble finger, which the grasp of manhood cannot retain,
which it is the pride of utmost age to recover. — John Ruskin

A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can.
It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune make for a finer, nobler type of manhood.
Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. — Theodore Roosevelt

Stop looking for the path of least resistance and start running down the path of greatest glory to God and good to others, because that's what Jesus, the Real Man, did. — Mark Driscoll

Our youth and manhood are due to our country, but our declining years are due to ourselves. — Pliny The Elder

There are alternate definitions of manhood in the West. — Frank Dobson

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright. — Samuel Gompers

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people then to dominate them, more 'manhood' to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind. — Alex Karras

You aren't a true husband/man until you've done the work of a wife/women — Leon Uris

A leader who arrives in a new setting, or inherits a big role, needs to curb the impulse to display his manhood. — Alex Ferguson

I'm glad I didn't have to fight in any war. I'm glad I didn't have to pick up a gun. I'm glad I didn't get killed or kill somebody. I hope my kids enjoy the same lack of manhood. — Tom Hanks

Can a woman raise a man alone? yes, but she shouldn't have to. — Darnell Lamont Walker

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. — John Steinbeck

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. — Herman Melville

Blood is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood ... there are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them! — Padraig Pearse

A real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. — George S. Patton Jr.

And in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close. — Emmuska Orczy

Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man. — H.G.Wells

If Jesus looks too feminine to us, maybe it says more about our understanding of masculinity than it does about a possible conspiracy to feminize the church and men. — Nate Pyle

The amiable is a duty most certainly, but must not be exercised at the expense of any of the virtues. He who seeks to do the amiable always, can only be successful at the frequent expense of his manhood. — William Gilmore Simms

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them
And to know that they are the wounds that make love real.
His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again
I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too
and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality. — James Kavanaugh

My responsibility is always and everywhere the same: to see in my brother more even than the personality and manhood that are his. My task is always and everywhere the same: to see Christ himself. — Trevor Huddleston

Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, now it is a problem to be overcome. — Garrison Keillor

The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is.
A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name? — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is not a mark of manhood to carelessly use the name of the Almighty or of His Beloved Son in a vain and flippant way, as many are prone to do. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Maybe the answer isn't in another job," Wendy said. "Maybe the answer is in finding new ways to define manhood. — Harlan Coben

Manhood isn't something that simply happens to boys as they get older. It's an achievement - something a boy accomplishes, something that can easily go awry. If we ignore the importance of this transition, and fail in our duty as parents to guide boys through it, then we will learn the hard way why traditional cultures invest this transition with so much importance. — Leonard Sax

Unlike some of the Arabs of antiquity who learned to make a living as farmers or merchants, the mark of manhood for the Arab nomads who followed Muhammad was the possession of arms, obsession with honor, and claim to pastures, camels, and women. Robbery and murder outside the protective confines of one's clan were simply the means to an end." 125 It was upon the ethos of the ruthless raid that Muhammad founded Islam. — Larry Kelley

Between the innocence of boyhood and the dignity of manhood, we find a delightful creature called a boy ... A boy is truth with dirt on its face, beauty with a cut on its finger, wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the hope of the future with a frog in its pocket. — Alan Beck

Most religious scriptures are all about three apparently glorifying elements, -man, man and man. — Abhijit Naskar

There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least. — Henry Ward Beecher

The Bolshevists would blow up the fabric with high explosive, with horror. Others would pull down with the crowbars and with cranks
especially with cranks ... Sweating, slums, the sense of semi-slavery in labour, must go. We must cultivate a sense of manhood by treating men as men. — David Lloyd George

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood. — Felix J. Palma

Why are you making no more songs?' I said to him in a tone like that. 'Why are you making no more songs?' 'I have grown to be a man. Only children make songs -- children and idiots.' [William the road-mender about Merlin] — John Steinbeck

The church is the gathering of God's children, where they can be helped and fed like babies and then guided by her motherly care, grow up to manhood in maturity of faith. — John Calvin

Adversity toughens manhood, and the characteristic of the good or the great man is not that he has been exempt from the evils of life, but that he has surmounted them. — Patrick Henry

At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his place ... — Winston Churchill

[Lizzie Bennington to a reporter who has asked for her opinion about Jack Archer's celebrated thighs.] When you come back from a set down and bring the match to a final set tiebreak and are a point away from winning the match, only to have what looks like an extremely fit player call a time out because of a cramp and then watch that player sit back and casually converse and laugh while you do your best to keep your mental focus and your body moving so you don't grow cold and cramp yourself, I hardly think you'd concern yourself with his burgeoning manhood, let alone his thighs! — A.G. Starling

The strength of opening manhood is never so well employed as in practicing subserviency to God's revealed will; it lends a grace and a beauty to religion, and produces an abundant harvest. — Richard Mant

Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva." Here he paused, speculative. "No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. 'Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,' she told him. 'My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.' — Laini Taylor

Few boys have been as fortunate as I, raised into manhood with only the gentlest of words and blandishments in my ears and the kindest of caresses upon my person, by a mother who sheltered us from everything that is harsh and ugly in this world. I was spoiled, utterly unprepared for cruelty, and perhaps this sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm not! You mustn't think I blame you. I'm afraid I must sound like the most ungrateful son in the world, when in fact the opposite is true. I am more grateful now than ever for the way you raised us, teaching us the value of kindness, of education, of independent thinking and liberal ideals, in the face of the fascism that is sweeping our country. The cruelest punishments now fail to bring even a tear to my eye, but the thought of the hardship you've suffered on behalf of your ideals makes me weep like a baby. — Ruth Ozeki

She was so going to get it later. Macy, queen of my universe, I beseechingly request you place your sweetest lips upon my manhood and make it your lollipop. — Cherrie Lynn

We never know how much one loves till we know how much he is willing to endure and suffer for us; and it is the suffering element that measures love. The characters that are great must, of necessity, be characters that shall be willing, patient and strong to endure for others. To hold our nature in the willing service of another is the divine idea of manhood, of the human character. — Henry Ward Beecher

The spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. — James Joyce

Manhood is melted into courtesies, valor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. — William Shakespeare

Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences. — Ian McEwan

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? — Henry David Thoreau

I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap. — John Steinbeck

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong. — Edna Ferber

I know that not every family is a clean-cut nuclear Mom and Dad at home situation - but I think every father needs to do whatever he can to be present in the lives of his kids. If you are in a situation where you have not been - fight for it. Don't give up till you get it. Don't be a jerk about it - don't "fight" mom - but "fight" whatever things tell you to just give up. Send cards, make phone calls, pay your support, and do whatever you can to be present in the lives of your children. — Josh Hatcher

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers. — D.H. Lawrence

You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind. — Habeeb Akande

Human life, from the cradle to the grave, is a school. At every period of his existence man wants a teacher. His pilgrimage upon earth is but a term of childhood, in which he is to be educated for the manhood of a brighter world. As the child must be educated for manhood upon earth, so the man must be educated upon earth, for heaven; and finally that where the foundation is not laid in time, the superstructure can not rise for eternity. — John Quincy Adams

No man ever reaches manhood till a woman's tenderness Is a part of his possession. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Isn't it enough to be middle-aged and impeccably beautiful? Why must one be economically useful? — Pietros Maneos

What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth. — Mark Twain

I was never in an awkward position where I had to curb my manhood. — Beanie Sigel

Every man's powers have relation to some kind of work; and whenever he finds that kind of work which he can do best
that to which his powers are best adapted
he finds that which will give him the best development, and that by which he can best build up, or make, his manhood. — J.G. Holland

Let us have an education, that shall practically develop our thinking faculties and manhood; and then, and only then, shall we be able to vie with our oppressors, go where we may ... — Martin Delany

She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled.

She knew.

He took her in his arms and kissed her ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood. — Glendon Swarthout

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. — Beryl Markham

Covetousness puts money above manhood. It shackles its devotee and makes him its victim. It hardens the heart and deadens the noble impulses and destroys the vital qualities of life. — Billy Graham

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a "shared manhood" (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of "shared womanhood"). Trans men don't all transition to just become "men," which was one of the projects' cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses.

One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts."

- from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez — Mitch Kellaway

We have not sought this conflict; we have sought too long to avoid it; our forbearance has been construed into weakness, our magnanimity into fear, until the vindication of our manhood, as well as the defence of our rights, is required at our hands. — Robert Toombs

Fellow-feeling ... is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our national nor our local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other's passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity. — Theodore Roosevelt

Battles against Rome have been lost and won before, but hope was never abandoned, since we were always here in reserve. We, the choicest flower of Britain's manhood, were hidden away in her most secret places. Out of sight of subject shores, we kept even our eyes free from the defilement of tyranny. We, the most distant dwellers upon earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by our very remoteness and by the obscurity in which it has shrouded our name. Now, the farthest bounds of Britain lie open to our enemies; and what men know nothing about they always assume to be a valuable prize ...
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of 'government'; they create a desolation and call it peace ... — Tacitus

He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

Teach them the quiet words of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly. — Pat Conroy

You think a man doesn't fall down, son? A real man falls down nine times and gets up ten. You think real men don't get scared? We do, all the time, especially when the people we love can be taken away from us. The key to manhood is being there, every morning when she wakes up, every night before she goes to bed. That's what a man does. It has nothing to do with how good you are with some shiny knives. And if you let her do this thing alone, then by God - — Ann Aguirre

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all. — Camille Paglia

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women's status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values. — Naomi Wolf

Murtagh was right about women. Sassenach, I risked my life for ye, committing theft, arson, assault, and murder into the bargain. In return for which ye call me names, insult my manhood, kick me in the ballocks and claw my face. Then I beat you half to death and tell ye all the most humiliating things have ever happened to me, and ye say ye love me." He laid his head on his knees and laughed some more. Finally he rose and held out a hand to me, wiping his eyes with the other.
"You're no verra sensible, Sassenach, but I like ye fine. Let's go. — Diana Gabaldon

Rather than trying to prove our masculinity, we need to accept who we are in the spirit of the gospel. Instead of trying to live up to some cultural standard of manhood, we need to accept God's grace, which says, "I accept you just as you are." It is culture, not God, that alienates those who do not live up to the existing, narrow definition of manhood. — Nate Pyle

Again I insist upon the point. The whole of the sexual revolution has been a colossal failure, and has wrought untold human misery. The move for same-sex pseudogamy is inextricable from that revolution; it is grafted upon it and cannot survive or even appear to make sense without it. We cannot have a good nation unless we are a good people. We cannot be a good people when we throw contempt upon manhood and womanhood and the virtue that honors their beauty and their being for one another; it is like asking for clean sleaze, or cold love. — Anthony M. Esolen

I don't see how being handsome can possibly harm a man. It's just another cheap privilege that took zero effort to attain. — Jamie Le Fay

Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power
that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Fight them with your faith in God, fight them in defense of every free honorable woman and every innocent child, and in defense of the values of manhood and the military honor ... Fight them because with their defeat you will be at the last entrance of the conquest of all conquests. The war will end with ... dignity, glory, and triumph for your people, army, and nation. — Saddam Hussein

Here is the manliness of manhood, that a man has a good reason for what he does, and has a will in doing it. — Alexander MacLaren

How is it that you're such an expert on home pregnancy kits?"
You're asking that question of an Italian stallion like myself? The women call me 'sperm of thunder'. I don't dare stand too close for fear I may impregnate them with just a whiff of my manhood. — Jill Smolinski

The utopian male concept which is the premise of male pornography is this
since manhood is established and confirmed over and against the brutalized bodies of women, men need not aggress against each other; in other words, women absorb male aggression so that men are safe from it. — Andrea Dworkin

The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict. — Allan Bloom

Is there any country, sir," pursued the history student, "where submission to Government is not due to fear?" "The freedom that exists in any country," I replied, "may be measured by the extent of this reign of fear. Where its threat is confined to those who would hurt or plunder, there the Government may claim to have freed man from the violence of man. But if fear is to regulate how people are to dress, where they shall trade, or what they must eat, then is man's freedom of will utterly ignored, and manhood destroyed at the root. — Rabindranath Tagore

Everything started as nothing. — Auliq Ice

I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. — George MacDonald

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify by their own lonesome familiarities to this feeling. Ecstasy, even , I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. — Jack Kerouac

He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year. — John Le Carre

When young, we trust ourselves too much, and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute. — Charles Caleb Colton

It is strange,' he said at last. 'I had longed to enter the world of men. Now I see it filled with sorrow, with cruelty and treachery, with those who would destroy all around them.'
'Yet, enter it you must,' Gwydion answered, 'for it is a destiny laid on each of us. True, you have seen these things. But there are equal parts of love and joy. — Lloyd Alexander

Unlike femininity, relaxed masculinity is at bottom empty, a limp nullity. While the female body is full of internal potentiality, the male is internally barren. Manhood at the most basic level can be validated and expressed only in action. — George Gilder

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules. — Tom Clancy

I love movies and all, but I could never imagine standing around saying lines and playing make believe all day. It's too fucking ridiculous. Also, even children and animals can technically be actors. It's not a job for a man. — A.D. Aliwat

Men cannot be men - much less good or heroic men - unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men. Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that. A rite of passage must reflect a real change in status and responsibility for it to be anything more than theater. No reimagined manhood of convenience can hold its head high so long as the earth remains the tomb of our ancestors — Jack Donovan

Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things about the British Mod movement was that being macho was no longer the only measure of manhood. — Pete Townshend

We have nothing. We solace ourselves with the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves. 'Here, take my manhood and invest it for me. Take my manhood and be a greater man yourself, for my sake! — V.S. Naipaul

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. — C.S. Lewis

He didn't know why, but seeing her made him feel like a man. She was something out of a dream - a dream in which he was not a spoiled young prince, but a king. — Sarah J. Maas

I grew to manhood in the Ohio State Penitentiary. — Chester Himes

The difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. — C.S. Lewis

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. — Pat Conroy

I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school. — Henry George