Infantile Quotes - Page 4

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

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Want, Gains

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

  Hayao Miyazaki

  Adults, Weaponry, Manifestation

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• Certainly the most obvious . . . example of the strictly infantile essence of America's all-conquering mentality greets our eyes daily, anywhere and everywhere, in the guise of the tabloid newspaper. The tabloid newspaper actually means to the typical American of the era what the Bible is popularly supposed to have meant to the typical Pilgrim Father: viz. a very present help in times of trouble, plus a means of keeping out of trouble via harmless, since vicarious, indulgence in the pomps and vanities of this wicked world.

  e. e. cummings

  Father, Mean, Eye

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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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• A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honour of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him. His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths.

  Stephen Crane

  Book, Boys, Devil

  Stephen Crane (2005). “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets & Other Stories”, p.1, Wordsworth Editions

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• The so-called film star's lot is an infantile and precarious one.

  Hildegard Knef

  Movie, Stars, Film

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• true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.

  David Bentley Hart

  Philosophical, Wish, Atheism

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• The steadily inward look leads us all to death, nations as well as persons, and is equally infantile in them all. Perhaps the most useful thing I have learned in my lifetime is that the process of maturing gradually turns the mind away from the small-self to the greater-self that is only served by serving others.

  Margery Wilson

  Self, Mind, Inward

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• I wanted revenge; I wanted to dance on the graves of a few people who made me unhappy. It's a pretty infantile way to go through life - I'll show them - but I've done it, and I've got more than I ever dreamed of.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Revenge, People, Unhappy

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• Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain't-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on--our lost narcissism lives on--in our ego ideal.

  Judith Viorst

  Dream, Giving Up, Growing Up

  Judith Viorst (2010). “Necessary Losses: The Loves Illusions Dependencies and Impossible Ex”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

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• Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rational, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be savedthat is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.

  Vivian Gornick

  Giving Up, Pain, Fear

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• I'm self-centered, inconsiderate, and what was the third adjective? Oh, yes, and I have this infantile fantasy that one day I'll amount to something as an actress.

  Jay Presson Allen

  Self, One Day, Adjectives

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• Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.

  Sigmund Freud

  Children, Men, Play

  Sigmund Freud (2013). “Leonardo da Vinci”, p.76, Routledge

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• When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children. We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Dark, Matter

  "The Defendant". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1901.

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• Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Fashion, Lying, Angel

  Stanislaw Lem (1984). “His Master's Voice”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.

  Selma Fraiberg

  Children, Animal, Pleasure Seeking

  Selma H. Fraiberg (2015). “The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Childhood, Gullible, Possibility

  "God, Science, and Delusion: A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke". Interview with Matt Cherry, Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 19, No. 2, Spring 1999.

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• When I was 13 and 14, there were a lot of jokes about my bar mitzvah and my grandparents, and then when I got older, it became more about touching boobs and trying to get liquor, you know? I kind of ran the gamut of infantile behavior... And I haven't moved one step forward since.

  Seth Rogen

  Grandparent, Touching, Trying

  Interview with Scott Tobias, film.avclub.com. May 31, 2007.

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• The fact that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life is the core of human tragedy.

  Erik Erikson

  Tragedy, Facts, Life Is

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• Madame Bovary is one my favorite novels. Emma Bovary will always be an enigma, but as the years pass, I feel that I understand her better. She has a violent nostalgia, almost an infantile nostalgia, to be understood by the men surrounding her. I like her relentless fight for independence, her rebellion against the mediocre, and her quest for the sublime, even if she burns her wigs in the process. I like that Flaubert never judges her morally for her self-destructiveness, for her desperate attempt to satisfy her wildest desires and appetites.

  Sophie Barthes

  Fighting, Men, Self

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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