Early Life Quotes

• There is a probably natural and learned reticence with myself talking about my early life.

  Pamela Stephenson

  Talking, Natural, Reticence

  60 Copy quote

• Teach a child how to think, not what to think.

  Sidney Sugarman

  Education, Teacher, Children

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  Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

  Margaret Mead

  Education, Teacher, Children

  Margaret Mead (1973). “Coming of Age in Samoa”

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• Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspirational, Change, Inspiring

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• It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

  Winston Churchill

  Military, Book, Teaching

  My Early Life ch. 9 (1930)

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• Quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.

  Winston Churchill

  Memories, Giving, Good Thoughts

  My Early Life ch. 9 (1930)

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• It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

  Winston Churchill

  Memories, Book, Men

  My Early Life ch. 9 (1930)

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• Almost all men are over anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor and on they go as their fathers went before them till weary and sick at heart they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.

  Samuel Rogers

  Regret, Father, Heart

  Samuel Rogers (1842). “Italy, a Poem”, p.178

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• If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

  Charles Dickens

  Children, Pain, Men

  "Oliver Twist".

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• In early life I had felt a strong desire to devote myself to the experimental study of nature; and, happening to see a glass containing some camphor, portions of which had been caused to condense in very beautiful crystals on the illuminated side, I was induced to read everything I could obtain respecting the chemical and mechanical influences of light, adhesion, and capillary attraction.

  John William Draper

  Beautiful, Nature, Strong

  John William Draper (1973). “Scientific memoirs, being experimental contributions to a knowledge of radiant energy”, Ayer Co Pub

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• The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal.

  Alfred Adler

  Goal, Unity, Style

  Alfred Adler (2013). “The Science of Living (Psychology Revivals)”, p.46, Routledge

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• I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full of uncertainties. It still is. My "Buddha book" expresses that. Perhaps that's what created this impression of earnestness.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• In my early life my mother tried to create a nurturing environment in which my mind could play. Her big rule was "Never lose in your imagination." She told me that thoughts were things and that I would become the thing I thought of most. This kind of empowerment is crucial to creative thinking.

  Joey Reiman

  Mother, Thinking, Play

  Joey Reiman (2001). “Thinking for a Living: Creating Ideas That Revitalize Your Business, Career, and Life”, p.141, Taylor Trade Publishing

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• A mystery, and a dream, should my early life seem.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Dream, Mystery, Should

  Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Ollive Mabbott (1969). “Complete Poems”, p.75, University of Illinois Press

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• When we notice a connection between our present fears and their origins in early life, we are finding out how much of our identity is designed by fear. Is fear the architect of me?

  David Richo

  Fear, Identity, Connections

  David Richo (2014). “When Love Meets Fear: How to Become Defense-less and Resource-full”, p.39, Paulist Press

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• For me Oliver Twist is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

  Henning Mankell

  Children, Widows And Orphans, Political

  6 Copy quote

• We spend so much of our early lives trying to figure out who we really are. And we spend the rest of our lives preparing ourselves to let it go.

  John Cameron Mitchell

  Let It Go, Trying, Figures

  9 Copy quote

• I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.

  Melissa Febos

  School, Reality, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Many a woman shudders... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Art, Army, Intellectual

  "The Female Experience". Book by Gerda Lerner (Chapter 87), 1977.

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• Breaking the ice in the pitcher seems to be a feature of the early lives of all great men.

  Robert Benchley

  Men, Ice, Pitcher

  Robert Benchley (1943). “Benchley beside himself”

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• I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

  William E. Gladstone

  Needs, Advantage, Grammar

  Letter to Mrs. Gladstone on January 14, 1860. "Gladstone as Financier and Economist" by Francis Wrigley Hirst, p. 242, 1931.

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• The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Influence, Impressionable

  Interview with David Attwell, www.dn.se. December 8, 2003.

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• I do remember how it was to be poor. I do remember that in my early years, we had to grow and raise all of our food, even our animals. And I remember in my early life, we didn't even have electricity. So it was very, very hard times then.

  Dolly Parton

  Hard Times, Animal, Years

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• I think every young girl at some point in her early life wonders what it's like to be a princess. They like the idea of dressing up and the fun of it.

  Julie Andrews

  Girl, Fun, Princess

  "Legendary actress Julie Andrews turns the page". Interview with Joy Sewing, www.chron.com. June 6, 2012.

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• He who matures early lives in anticipation.

  Theodor Adorno

  Anticipation

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.161, Verso

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