Infantile Quotes - Page 3

• I am a father. My son's name is Max and my daughter's name is Billie Grace. Twelve years ago Max was born with Down Syndrome. His journey has been complicated by infantile seizures, sleep apnea, dietary challenges and now, puberty!

  John C. McGinley

  Daughter, Mother, Father

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• ...once the cards are dealt we turn them up in turn, and make two piles each, one red, one black; the winner has the biggest pile of red ones. So once the cards are dealt the game is determined, and from any position in it you can derive all others back to the deal and forward to win or draw. ...in relation to the solar system..., the laws are like the rules of an infantile card game.... But in relation to what happens on and inside a planet the laws are, rather, like the rules of chess; the play is seldom determined, though nobody breaks the rules.

  G. E. M. Anscombe

  Winning, Law, Games

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• The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden - as an unpatriotic act - that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

  James A. Baldwin

  Black And White, Boys, Cowboy

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• In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

  John Updike

  Mother, War, Pulse

  John Updike (1991). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

  Karen Armstrong

  Ideas, Levels, Santa

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• I know now for a fact that improv can't hold a candle to doing standup. It's not the same buzz, it just isn't. It feels infantile to me at times. When you see guys who do it really well, great. But improv needs a rewrite.

  Ron James

  Guy, Needs, Buzz

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• Science corrects the old creeds, sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment that was older and awaited expectant these larger insights.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Law, Perception

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.183

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• To mature means to take responsibility for your life, to be on your own. Psychoanalysis fosters the infantile state by considering that the past is responsible for the illness.

  Frederick Salomon Perls

  Mean, Responsibility, Past

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• The view that women are infantile and emotional creatures, and as such, incapable of responsibility and independence is the work of the masculine tendency to lower women's self-respect.

  Karen Horney

  Responsibility, Emotional, Self

  Karen Horney (1967). “Feminine Psychology”

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• Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

  Olive Schreiner

  Humanity, Gone, Slavery

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• I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

  Seymour Papert

  Jobs, Children, Teaching

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• The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.

  Philip Pullman

  Adults, Maps, Way

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• On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.

  Audrey Hepburn

  Hands, Suffering, Age

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• Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

  James A. Baldwin

  Fear, Grace, Growth

  "Letter from a Region in My Mind" by James A. Baldwin, www.newyorker.com. November 17, 1962.

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• The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

  Terry Eagleton

  Thinking, Views, Tradition

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• Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

  Ingmar Bergman

  Night, Feelings, Arrogance

  Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, 1971.

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• Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.

  Erich Fromm

  Love, Maturity, Immature

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.46, Open Road Media

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• In general, I feel, or I have come to feel, that the richest writing comes not from the people who dedicate themselves to writing alone. I know this is contradicted again and again but I continue to feel it. They don't, of course, write as much, or as fast, but I think it is riper and more satisfying when it does come. One of the difficulties of writing or doing any kind of creative work in America seems to me to be that we put such stress on production and material results. We put a time pressure and a mass pressure on creative work which are meaningless and infantile in that field.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Stress, Writing, Thinking

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• The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Atheism, Demand, Patterns

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• We want to be all things, not just to gain power over things - how infantile!

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Want, Gains

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• Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

  William Gibson

  Running, Baby, Eye

  William Gibson (2003). “Idoru”, p.32, Penguin

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• I've never gone anywhere where the men have come up to my infantile expectations. I always have gone through life constantly being surprised by the extreme, marvelous qualities of a small minority of men. But I can't see the rest of them. They seem awful rubbish.

  Rebecca West

  Men, Expectations, Quality

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• Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.

  George Steiner

  Dream, Song, Infidelity

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.210, Faber & Faber

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• In politics continental Europe was infantile - horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This is what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

  Saul Bellow

  Europe, America, Political

  Saul Bellow (2016). “It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future”, p.204, Odyssey Editions

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• The love of weaponry is often a manifestation of infantile traits in an adult.

  Hayao Miyazaki

  Adults, Weaponry, Manifestation

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