37 Quotes About Adulthood

Navigating the world of adulthood can be both thrilling and challenging, filled with opportunities for growth and moments of self-discovery. As we step into this phase, we encounter a myriad of experiences that shape who we are and how we perceive the world around us. Often, it's the wisdom of others that puts our own journeys into perspective, offering insight, comfort, and humor when we need it most. In this collection of 37 quotes about adulthood, we've gathered words from various voices that capture the essence of growing up. Whether you're seeking motivation, solace, or simply a smile, these quotes are here to remind you that you're not alone on this path.

1. “The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.” - Katherine Dunn

2. “For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.” - John Connolly

3. “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” - Albert Einstein

4. “Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

5. “People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.” - Bryan White

6. “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.” - Dr. Seuss

7. “Oh, you mysterious girls, when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the meanness your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.” - J.M. Barrie

8. “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

9. “Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood” - Rudyard Kipling

10. “I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.” - Maya Angelou

11. “Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?” - Richard Paul Evans

12. “I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die.” - Paul Auster

13. “I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” - Carl Gustav Jung

14. “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

15. “Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different” - Tana French

16. “People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.” - Chad Harbach

17. “On est forcé d'être des enfants toute sa vie. C'est pour ça que ceux qui veulent devenir des hommes sont malheureux. Vous voulez chanter l'opéra? On rit de vous. Vous voulez vous conduire en monsieur avec les femmes? Elles vous traitent de tapette si vous n'êtes pas champion avec des muscles gros comme ça. Vous voulez avoir une bonne position dans un bureau? La compétence, c'est toujours les autres qui l'ont.” - Roger Lemelin

18. “She had the feeling, the tingling, lingering sense that something or someone life altering was just over the horizon. She had no idea what it was, but she wanted to rush headlong to bring it to her.” - Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

19. “It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.” - Suzanne Finnamore

20. “The red firelight glowed on their two bonny heads and revealed their faces, animated with the eager interest of children; for, though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel, and learn, that neither experienced nor evinced the sentiments of sober disenchanted maturity.” - Emily Brontë

21. “‎With adulthood comes responsibility.” - Mary Lydon Simonsen

22. “On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change when you're not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unstable cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don't notice the time of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you're the boss. Because . . . Ooooh. Shiny. ” - Sloane Crosley

23. “Unfortunately, some family members are so psychotic that no matter how hard you try to forge a healthy relationship, nothing will help. Now that you're an adult, take refuge in the fact that some things are beyond your control. You owe it to yourself to steer clear of people who are harmful to your health.” - Andrea Lavinthal

24. “As a man begins to understand the sacrifices he must make to live the life he dreams of, he often loses his courage for such a life.” - Josie Sigler

25. “O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.” - Leo Rosten

26. “This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.” - Margaret Atwood

27. “If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert without eating her vegetables.” - Lisa Alther

28. “He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.” - Scott Spencer

29. “Adults havethe benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct.When we “grow up” we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence andsense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense ofloss.” - Alberto Alvaro Ríos

30. “Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.” - Robert Charles Wilson

31. “I once tried to give him a friendly little "drugs chat". He politely corrected me on every single fact, then said he'd noticed I drank above the recommended guidelines of Red Bull and did I think I might have an addiction? That was the last time I tried to act like the older sister.” - Sophie Kinsella I've got your number

32. “Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.” - John D. MacDonald

33. “The adult world may seem a cold and empty place, with no fairies and no Father Christmas, no Toyland or Narnia, no Happy Hunting Ground where mourned pets go, and no angels - guardian or garden variety. But there are also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no daemonic possession, no bogeymen or ogres. Yes, Teddy and Dolly turn out not to be really alive. But there are warm, live, speaking, thinking, adult bedf ellows to hold, and many of us find it a more rewarding kind of love than the childish affection for stuffed toys, however soft and cuddly they may be.” - Richard Dawkins

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

35. “Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.” - Neil Gaiman

36. “You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.” - Michael Marshall Smith

37. “Above all, staring at my old bedroom ceiling, I feel safe. Cocooned from the world; wrapped up in cotton wool. No one can get me here. No one even knows I'm here. I won't get any nasty letters and I won't get any nasty phone calls and I won't get any nasty visitors. It's like a sanctuary. I feel as if I'm fifteen again, with nothing to worry about but my Homework. (And I haven't even got any of that.)” - Sophie Kinsella