Boyhood Quotes - Page 4

• A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

  J. B. Priestley

  School, Men, Style

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• One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.

  Booth Tarkington

  Natural, Invention, Hardest

  Newton Booth Tarkington (2015). “Penrod”, p.31, Booklassic

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• It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame.

  Oscar Wilde

  Dream, Memories, Passion

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• It is a well-known fact that very often, putting the period of boyhood out of the argument, the older we grow the more cynical and hardened we become; indeed, many of us are only saved by timely death from moral petrification, if not from moral corruption.

  H. Rider Haggard

  Cynical, Moral Corruption, Facts

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• He's like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Cousin, Animal, Air

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• My boyhood ambition was to be able to earn my own living, without the help of anybody, anywhere.

  Herbert Hoover

  Ambition, Able, Helping

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• You sometimes find something good in the lunatic fringe. In fact, we have got as part of our social and economic government today a whole lot of things which in my boyhood were considered lunatic fringe, and yet they are now part of everyday life.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Government, Everyday, Radicalism

  Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1950). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: F.D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945, Volume 13”, p.147, Best Books on

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• All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude-and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

  George Orwell

  Law, Profound, Wickedness

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “It is what I think: 1947-1948”

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• Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood's years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken.

  Charles Lamb

  Love, Memories, Heart

  7 Copy quote

• In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Religious, Talking, Years

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.378

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• Study is the scourge of boyhood, the environment of youth, the indulgence of adults and the curative for the aged.

  Saul Landau

  Learning, Adults, Youth

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• For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

  C.P. Snow

  Fall, Eye, Science

  C.P. Snow (2010). “The Search”, p.30, House of Stratus

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• Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.

  Dave Barry

  Dream, Depressing, Men

  7 Copy quote

• The glory of the nation rests in the character of her men. And character comes from boyhood. Thus every boy is a challenge to his elders.

  Herbert Hoover

  Character, Boys, Men

  Herbert Hoover (1946). “Addresses Upon the Road: World War II, 1941-1945”

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• Man has boyhood, adolescence, youth, middle age and senescence, as stages of growth; there are also corresponding stages in the growth of wisdom in him.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Men, Growth, Age

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• Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

  Annie Dillard

  Moving, Men

  Annie Dillard (1992). “The living”, Thorndike Pr

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• Such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures, that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would be still daily making progress in discovering their treasures.

  Richard Baxter

  Christian, Bored, Progress

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• Fatherhood is the unending imperfect task of turning yourself into your dad while secretly maintaining the unbridled elation of your boyhood

  Chris Hadfield

  Dad, Fatherhood, Tasks

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• The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, and love, and death: Old Skip was my brother. They had buried him under our elm tree, they said-yet this wasn't totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

  Willie Morris

  Friendship, Family, Dog

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• Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it.

  John Constable

  Horse, Lying, Grateful

  Letter to Rev. John Fisher, October 23, 1821.

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