30 Quotes About Adulthood

Navigating the world of adulthood can be both a fascinating and daunting journey, filled with newfound responsibilities, unexpected challenges, and endless opportunities for growth. Whether you're stepping into the world of grown-ups for the first time or have been at this adulthood game for a while, there’s always something to learn and reflect upon. Quotes have a unique way of encapsulating these experiences, offering wisdom, humor, and insights that resonate across diverse life paths. We've curated a collection of the top 30 quotes about adulthood to inspire, comfort, and maybe even provoke a little introspective chuckle as you navigate this complex journey. Dive in and find a bit of solace or motivation in each carefully chosen piece of wisdom.

1. “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.” - Peter De Vries

2. “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3. “That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.” - Peter David

4. “Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?” - Rick Riordan

5. “One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.” - Michael Ende

6. “... there had been the two little boys. Now they were gone, too. They loved her and called her and sent her e-mails and would still snuggle up to her to be petted when they were in the mood, but they were men, and though they would always be at the center of her life, she was no longer at the center of theirs.” - Cathleen Schine

7. “Without knowing it, the adults in our lives practiced a most productive kind of behavior modification. After our chores and household duties were done we were give "permission" to read. In other words, our elders positioned reading as a privilege - a much sought-after prize, granted only to those goodhardworkers who earned it. How clever of them.” - Mildred Armstrong Kalish

8. “Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.” - Robert Cormier

9. “Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up” - Stephen King

10. “Grown people with rational minds somehow do not know what's best for them.” - Jude Morgan

11. “Let's teach that loving isn't always loving. Like when you loved the hamster so much that it died. Some adults do that too. Too much, the wrong way. These are 'Stay away' zones on your body. These are 'Stay away' people. You don't have to obey all adults. Not even parents. Disagree respectfully. Run, if you need. Shout, if you need. Adults can be bad too.” - Deborah Ainslie

12. “Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids” - Mike A. Lancaster

13. “Adults tend to repress their pleasure. Sad to say, I think we become adults only through disappointment, grief, and lies. So of course gradually we become tough, less sensitive.” - Jean-Louis Gassee

14. “Their faith in him is at once touching and alarming -- their trust that they are safe simply because he's with them, as if an adult presence warded of all possible threat, emanated an unbreachable forcefield.” - Paul Murray

15. “Miles: Well, things are kind of complicated right now. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll understand.Jonah: I don’t want to be a grown-up.Miles: Why not?Jonah: Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated.” - Nicholas Sparks

16. “When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.” - Yoko Ogawa

17. “Eventually kids become grown-ups too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.” - Allison Winn Scotch

18. “It wasn't a bit of good fighting grown-ups. They could do exactly as they liked.” - Enid Blyton

19. “Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.” - Maurice Sendak

20. “Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

21. “A rebel adult often seems like a glorious savior, whereas a rebel child often seems like a little devil.” - Criss Jami

22. “Courage was no that hard to come by for children. No matter the hardships they faced, given a little love and encouragement, their spirits rebounded and thrived. Adults were different. Their habits and experiences made them inflexible, welding their routines into place, cementing their joys and hurts to create expectations of life that were not in line with the new realities. All around her, Cass saw the dazed expressions and the blank weariness.” - Sophie Littlefield

23. “Couples stray,” said Edgar. “Part of the breaking-in process.”“Not breaking in, breaking.” Nicola differed sharply. “You can glue people together again. But then your relationship’s like any other repaired object, with cracks, blobs of epoxy, a little askew. It’s never the same. I can see you haven’t a notion what I’m on about, so you’ll have to take my word for it.”“Christ, you’re a babe in the woods.” Edgar stopped slicing tomatoes. “You got it ass-backward. A marriage perched like porcelain on the mantelpiece is doomed. Sooner or later grown-ups treat each other like shit. You gotta be able to kick the thing around, less like china than an old shoe—bam, under the bed, or walk it through some puddles. No love’s gonna last it if can’t take abuse.” - Lionel Shriver

24. “Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane," he [Ed Ricketts] said. "And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever revered. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything by experience. Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules whose origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple over on them. I think children instinctively know this," Ed said. "Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.” - John Steinbeck

25. “Adults discourage children from asking philosophical questions, first by being patronizing to them and then by directing their inquiring minds towards more "useful" questions. Most adults aren't themselves interested in philosophical questions. They may be threatened by some of them. Moreover, it doesn't occur to most adults that there are questions that a child can ask that they can't provide a definitive answer to and that aren't answered in a standard dictionary or encyclopedia either.” - Gareth B. Matthews

26. “[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.” - Emma Donoghue

27. “We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

28. “Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.” - Victoria Schwab

29. “On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.” - Hendrik Willem Van Loon

30. “The problem with parents is that they're adults.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz