Infantile Quotes - Page 4

• A god who gave us everything we wanted would be the most malevolent god of all. With an infantile curiosity, we insist on tasting the cockroach on the floor while our father is preparing a magnificent feast for us.

  Criss Jami

  Father, Curiosity, Cockroaches

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.9, Criss Jami

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• Infantile people complain and say that God is cruel or that there is no God. Mature people, however, know that there is wisdom and sometimes an eternal kindness in God's refusals.

  Norman Vincent Peale

  Kindness, People, Complaining

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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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• I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Book, Looks, Disease

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• United States:. A nation given either to unjustified over-enthusiasms or infantile furies.

  John Ralston Saul

  United States, Enthusiasm, Given

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.299, Simon and Schuster

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• Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

  Jim Harrison

  Fate, Justice, Hardship

  Jim Harrison (2007). “Off to the Side: A Memoir”, p.18, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• For the beloved should not allow me to turn my infantile fantasies into reality: On the contrary, he should help me to go beyond them.

  Frantz Fanon

  Reality, Helping, Beloved

  Frantz Fanon (1967). “Black Skin, White Masks”, p.44, Pluto Press

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• What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.

  Kenneth Turan

  Thinking, Realization, Violence

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• I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.

  Ezra Pound

  Mean, Years, America

  Ezra Pound (1950). “The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941”, p.346, New Directions Publishing

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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