What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion. I am sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
How many of us really appreciate the childishness of the unconscious mind?
It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.
Though age from folly could not give me freedom, It does from childishness.
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life.
It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age.
I would not say that old men grow wise, for men never grow wise; and many old men retain a very attractive childishness and cheerful innocence. Elderly people are often much more romantic than younger people, and sometimes even more adventurous, having begun to realize how many things they do not know.
No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.
The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.
One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses. Real ideas must as a rule be simplified to the level of a child's understanding if they are to arouse the masses to historic actions. A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.
C. S. Lewis pointed out that some people are angry with God for His not existing, and others for His existing but for failing to do as mortals would have Him do. Instead of such childishness, we are urged to know God and to learn of His attributes.
For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.
There is no limit to childishness, if a person starts attacking the other one, they just strike back. Your weak point? Secret? They won't avoid it, and instead try to hurt you with it. So the reason you're fighting is totally lost. They'll just start thinking about how to hurt the other person most, so much that they'll cry out in pain.
Among the great men who have philosophized about [the action of the tides], the one who surprised me most is Kepler. He was a person of independent genius, [but he] became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.
or simply:
