Childish Quotations

I hope that there's a difference between being childish and childlike and that I'm the latter, if you take my meaning. I often sort of wonder. I don't think I'm a terribly good grown-up; I don't take responsibility easily or well in many areas of life. Finance and stuff like that, I'm absolutely appalling.

Writers to some extent are childish, and it's at the childish level that one really engages with any experience. What really moves you is at the very personal, childish level of the imagination. My business is the imagination, and my imagination is engaged by Asia.

I hear a lot of people singing in funny voices and singing like they're stupid. Singing in a deliberately fey and dumb and childish way. And I find it to be a disturbing trend.

Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish and inefficient, as does the writer who grows self-conscious in the middle of chapter five.

I seriously believed that my last hour was approaching, and yet, so strange is imagination, all I thought of was some childish hypothesis or other. In such circumstances, you do not choose your own thoughts. They overcome you.

You just suddenly think that there's something quite childish about acting. Basically, it's pretending, isn't it? It's good fun and I enjoy it, but it's a funny way of making a living, particularly when you make a very good wage, as I've been fortunate enough to do.

While living, apparently, as modern men and women, using electric fans and electric irons, telephones and trains, and aeroplanes, when they can afford it, they nourish in their hearts a deep contempt for the childish conceit and bloated hopes of our age, and for the various recipes for saving, mankind, which zealous philosophers and politicians thrust into circulation. They know that nothing can save mankind, for mankind is reaching the end of its present cycle. The wave that carried it, for so mane millenniums, is about to break, with all the fury of acquired speed, and to merge once more into the depth of the unchanging Ocean of undifferentiated existence. It will rise; again, some day, with abrupt majesty, for such is the law of waves. But in the meantime nothing can be done to stop it.

Let simple Wordsworth chime his childish verse, / And brother Coleridge lull the babe at nurse.

I didn't want the school to come off as asking little childish questions. Everyone wanted it to be very serious.

I have a very childish attitude to books - a very non-analytic enthusiasm... like Alice falling down the chute.

That surprised me. A guy like him doing something childish like that.

'Yes we can' always struck many as a naive and childish chant, like something ripped off from the Camp Fire Girls.

As I look back on it, I know our season ended the day J.V. died because I know none of us got over it. You just lose focus. All of a sudden you find out in some ways how childish you've been in the way you've devoted your whole life to this game. Then all of a sudden it hits you that there are bigger things in play.

The whole thing has been a very childish exercise and this is the price of democracy.

The senator's childish need for attention masks his stark inability to get things done in the Legislature for his constituents.

There were one or two childish moments if you like, as I was growing up and maturing,

It's childish what they're doing. It shows the level of their maturity.

It's childish for the U.S. government not to cooperate with the new Human Rights Council when it cooperated for decades with the vastly inferior old Commission on Human Rights.

I like men to behave like men - strong and childish

I guess it's his style of game. Didn't he get two of them? I think it's selfish and childish of him. But, hey, he's his own man.

Children don't read to find their identity, to free themselves from guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology.... They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.

For someone to play a childish game like throwing a firecracker at an animal, it makes me angry.

Some of you may remember that in my early days, I was sort of a bleeding heart liberal. Then I became a man and put away childish ways.

Beloved Vale, I said, When I shall con those many records of my childish years

A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do -- namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself

It is the ignorant and childish part of man that is the fighting part