These adulthood quotes will inspire you. Adulthood is the period in the human lifespan in which full physical and intellectual maturity has been attained.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging adulthood quotes, adulthood sayings, and adulthood proverbs.
Famous Adulthood Quotes
- “Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.” ~ Walt Disney
- “Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.” ~ John Fowles
- “The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life.” ~ Darren Hardy
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“The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.” ~ Bruce Springsteen
- “A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “I spent my whole childhood wishing I were older and now I’m spending my adulthood wishing I were younger.” ~ Ricky Schroder
- “We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we have stopped saying ‘It got lost,’ and say, ‘I lost it.'” ~ Sydney J. Harris
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“What is an adult? A child blown up by age.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir
- “Life is truly a ride. We’re all strapped in and no one can stop it. When the doctor slaps your behind, he’s ripping your ticket and away you go. As you make each passage from youth to adulthood to maturity, sometimes you put your arms up and scream, sometimes you just hang on to that bar in front of you. But the ride is the thing. I think the most you can hope for at the end of life is that your hair’s messed, you’re out of breath, and you didn’t throw up.” ~ Jerry Seinfeld
- “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “The tough thing about adulthood is it starts before you even know it starts.” ~ Robert Redford
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“For me adulthood is realising that there are no grown-ups and everyone else is winging it.” ~ Sarah Beeny
- “It happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you’ve known forever don’t see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “It seems to me that the years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult – but you are not ready.” ~ Helen Mirren
- “Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.” ~ Sigmund Freud
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“In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.” ~ Socrates
- “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.” ~ Dr. Seuss
- “Personal change, growth, development, identity formation–these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events–a job, a mate, a child–through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.” ~ Lillian B. Rubin
- “When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you” ~ Gail Carson Levine
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“To be adult is to be alone.” ~ Jean Rostand
- “When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.” ~ Patrick Rothfuss
- “Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.” ~ Louise J. Kaplan
- “I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that. Don’t rush into adulthood, it isn’t all that much fun.” ~ Bob Newhart , Child adulthood quotes
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“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
- “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.” ~ George Orwell
- “Being an adult is the ability to postpone a want for the sake of a family need.” ~ Chris Hogan
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“Adulthood was invented to repair the wounds of childhood.” ~ Joy Browne
- “Adulthood isn’t black and white – it’s a thousand shades of grey. Or taupe. It’s not who you are, it’s where you are.” ~ Elizabeth Noble
- “Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.” ~ Walter Savage Landor
- “Being raised in an unstable household makes you understand that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate you, which… is something a lot of people struggle to understand well into their adulthood. It makes you realize how quickly a situation can shift, how danger really is everywhere. But crises when the occur, do not catch you off guard; you have never believed you lived under a shelter of some essential benevolence. And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement.” ~ Curtis Sittenfeld
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“One of the privileges of adulthood is that your parents don’t get to tell you what to do.” ~ Amy Dickinson
- “When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn’t feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter.” ~ Jodie Foster
- “You might wish to revisit your understanding of the word everything.” Gregory turned to his mother. “Vocabulary and comprehension were never her strong suits.” Violet rolled her eyes. “Every day I marvel that the two of you managed to reach adulthood.” “Afraid we’d kill each other?” Gregory quipped. “No, that I’d do the job myself.” ~ Julia Quinn
- “Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” ~ David Mitchell
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“Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “Singlehood is not longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it’s the dessert – desirable, but no longer the main course.” ~ Stephanie Coontz
- “In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.” ~ Nicholson Baker
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“The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.” ~ Germaine Greer
- “Now that I’m feeling the responsibilities of adulthood, the choices we make become an incredible weight.” ~ Laura Marling
- “If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.” ~ P. D. James
- “According to Herodotus, the ancient Persians felt that what was necessary in the background of a young man entering adulthood was his ability to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth. Perhaps we should now grant our college degrees to young men who measure up to that standard.” ~ Jeff Cooper
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“Adulthood does not exist. Man is an eternal child.” ~ Nelson Rodrigues
- “‘The Queen Is Dead’ is not merely the Smiths’ best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.” ~ Rob Sheffield
- “Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.” ~ Ethan Hawke
- “Think, for a moment, about our educational ladder.
We’ve strengthened the steps lifting students from elementary school to junior high, and those from junior high to high school.
But, that critical step taking students from high school into adulthood is badly broken. And it can no longer support the weight it must bear.” ~ Melinda Gates -
“Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “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.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Part of the thrill of guiding children into adulthood is the release. But it’s also a parent’s greatest act of surrender. Still, you have to let them go. Start now.” ~ Charles R. Swindoll
- “there is no gateway to maturity; there is no line that is crossed. Maturity is like a maze, one path leading to another; it is like a great building full of corridors, one turning into another. Did anybody ever reach the end, so there was a clear way ahead, so he could say, now I am rich with knowledge, now I know all the answers?” ~ Mignon G. Eberhart
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“maturity … is letting things happen.” ~ Carolyn Heilbrun
- “Someone once remarked that in adolescence pornography is a substitute for sex, whereas in adulthood sex is a substitute for pornography.” ~ Edmund White
- “Adulthood is knowing that a fully realized character is always more important than the lines.” ~ Megan Crane
- “Once you move away from home, it’s never quite the same again. You expect everything to be just as you left it, and it never is. It’s almost the first step into adulthood, realising you’ve got to make your own way.” ~ Saoirse Ronan
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“Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life – at least so far – I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.” ~ Meg Cabot
- “Psychological adulthood is by no means a universal attainment.” ~ Frances G. Wickes
- “As an actor, I relish and delight in doing things that I’m not necessarily the demographic for. This is a demographic that is touching the psyche of a certain age group, facing the real internal questions of people who are going through rites of passage into adulthood. It’s earth-shaking stuff.” ~ Ray Stevenson
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“It’s rather hard to decide just when people are grown up.” ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
- “We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Adulthood brings with it a pernicious illusion of control.” ~ Juan Gabriel
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“Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.” ~ Bill Watterson
- “Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives.” ~ Walt Disney
- “The hardest obstacle I’ve ever had to overcome is probably my first steps into adulthood: paying rent, groceries, cooking, taxes. I was so anxious to grow up, and now I’m wishing I was still a kid.” ~ Dillon Lane
Adulthood is commonly thought of as beginning at age 20 or 21 years.
