Figure 1.--
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Figure 1.-- |
HBC readers will find a wide rang of interesting quotations here. Some famous quotations about boys provide some interestings insights into boys and childhood over the years. We will list some of our favorite quotations. We will include quotations by boys as well as adult quotations about boys. We will also include quotes from famous people about their boyhood or quotes by other about the boyhood of famous people. Do let us know if you have a favorite quotation. We will archive them by author. Most of our quotations are american or British, primarily because of our familarity with English-language literature and history. Hopefully our readers will provide some pertinent quottions from their country to include here.
But someone came and put an end to these mild and childish pleasures. Someone blew out the candle which illumined for me the sweet maternal face bent over the evening meal. Someone extinguished the lamp around which we had been a happy family group at night-time
when my father had closed all the wooden shutters. And that someone was Augustin Meaulnes, whom in no time the other boys began to call le grand Meaulnes. Le Grand Meaulnes (1912) pt. 1, ch. 2.
One can take a boy out of a village, but one cannot
take a village out of a boy.
Every boy ought to learn how to shoot and obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman. [Baden-Powell cautions boys at the beginning of his famous book, Scouting for Boys
Shorts are essential to hard work, to hiking and camping. They are less expensive and more hygienic than breeches or trousers. They give freedom and ventilation to the legs. Another advantage is that when the ground is wet, you can go about without stockings and none of your clothes gets damp. Scouting for Boys
The beauty of a Scout is that you tell him what to do, and you can rely on his doing it. A Scout never makes a mistake. I have never known a Scout make a mistake. B-P.'s Scouts. [HBC note: Of course anyone involved in Scouting knows that Scouts do makes mistakes. An important part of Scouting is to provide learning experienes for boys, let them make mistakes, and learn by those mistakes. A HBC reader writes, "I certainly made mistakes as a boy! We were building our tent in the dark and in the morning and the light you could see we could not have seen what we were doing. Our mistake was to work in
the dark. Our troup learnt a lesson to always work in the light!"
What is it our mammas bewitches, to plague us little boys with breeches?
A boy’s best friend is his mother. [HBC note: Famous line from the Hitchcock film Psycho.]
A boy is a magical creature, you can lock him out of your workshop, but you can’t lock him out of your heart. You can get him out of your study, but you can’t get him out of your mind. Might as well give up, he is your captor, your jailer, your boss and your master, a reckled-faced, pint-sized, cat-chasing bundle of noise. But when you come home at night with only the shattered pieces of your hopes and dreams, he can mend them like new with two magic words "Hi, Dad!"
I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
But a dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down, very important traits in times like these. In fact, just as soon as a dog comes along who, in addition to these qualities, also knows when to buy and sell stocks, he can be moved right up to the boy’s bedroom and the boy can sleep in the dog house.
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy.
I never reprimand a boy in the evening--darkness and a troubled mind are a poor combination.
You overfed the boy, Ma’am. You raised an artificial spirit in the lad, unbecoming to his station on life. This would never have happened if you kept him on gruel. [HBC note: Vernon Harris screenplay (c1910- ). Bumble explaining why Oliver Twist had become so difficult to handle at the funeral home. This is of course based on the Charles Dickens novel.]
Love is a boy, by poets styled,
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
"He is a charming boy!" my Lady exclaimed. "Even his snores are more musical than those of other boys!"
Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases
There’s nothing a well-regulated child hates so much as regularity. I believe a really healthy boy would thoroughly enjoy Greek Grammar; if only he might stand on his head to learn it!
Say it ain't so Joe. [HBC note: Comment from a disappointed boy whose hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson was involved in a scandal to throw a game. Jackson himself says it never happened and was invented by the press.]
By being so long in the lowest form [at Harrow] I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek. But I was taught English. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat.
A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?
To E.K.H. [Edward K. Hall] Whose boy, and my boy, by the grace of God. / Will remain boys through all Eternity. [HBC note: Inscription in a book presented to Mr. Hall whose son, like Calvin Coolidge, Jr., had died as a youth.
It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.
Better build schoolrooms for the
boy Than cells and gibbets for the man.
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. I’m beginning to believe it.
You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy!
O running stream of sparkling joy To be a soaring human boy! Bleak House (1853) ch. 19 (Mr Chadband).
I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys. Oliver Twist (1838) ch. 14 (Mr Grimwig).
Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother.... Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can’t even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.
For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for. She can watch him, as a child, play the games she was not allowed to play; she can invest in him her ideas, aspirations, ambitions, and values--or whatever she has left of them; she can watch her son, who came from her flesh and whose life was sustained by her work and devotion, embody her in the world. So while the project of raising a boy is fraught with ambivalence and leads inevitably to bitterness, it is the only project that allows a woman to be--to be through her son, to live through her son.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month. Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.
Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul?--A thought too bold,--a dream too wild.
A fairly bright boy is far more intelligent and far better company than the average adult.
From his childhood onwards this boy will be surrounded by sycophants and flatterers.... In due course, following the precedent which has already been set, he will be sent on a tour of the world and probably rumours of a morganatic marriage alliance will follow, and the end of it will be the country will be called upon to pay the bill. HBC note: Hardie was the first British Labour Party Member of Parliament. The quotation is from a speech in the House of Commons. He was opposing a motion congratulating Queen Victoria on the birth of her great grandon, the future King Edward VIII.
Among the interesting thing in camp are the boys. You recollect the boy in Captain McIlrath’s company; we have another like unto him in Captain Woodward’s. He ran away from Norwalk to Camp Dennison; went into the Fifth, then into the Guthries, and as we passed their camp, he was pleased with us, and now is "a boy of the Twenty-third." He drills, plays officer, soldier, or errand boy, and is a curiosity in camp. [HBC note: Boys were not just a curiosity in the Civil War. So many were involved in th fighting that is had been called "The Boys' War".]
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
Shone round him o’er the dead.
A boy becomes an adult three years before his parents think he does, and about two years after he thinks he does.
He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future!
A German boy must be lean and mean, quick like a greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. He must learn self-denial, to endure reproaches and injustice, to be reliable, silent, obedient, and loyal ... [Der deutsche Junge muss schlank und rank sein, flink wie ein Windhund, zäh wie Leder und hart wie Kruppstahl. Er muss lernen, Entbehrungen auf sich zu nehmen, Tadel und Unrecht zu ertragen, zuverlässig, verschwiegen, gehorsam und treu zu sein. ..."]
We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans -- that's the main thing-- must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives ...
You hear that boy laughing?--you think he’s all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.
Tom and his younger brothers as they grew up, went on playing with the village boys without the idea of equality or inequality (except in wrestling, running, and climbing) ever entering their heads, as it doesn’t till it’s put there by Jack Nastys or fine ladies’ maids. Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(1857) pt. 1, ch. 3.
There is an anecdote passed around in psychoanalytical circles, about a boy who for no apparent reason reached the age of six without ever speaking. One night he suddenly said, "Please pass the mashed potatoes." The boy had never spoken before because his mother had always met every one of his needs without him saying a word. This is the epitome of the too good mother.
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
Once a Scout, always a Scout. At Scout Rally, Leicestershire 1911.
The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say: Willie, is no good; I’ll sell him.
Oh would I were a boy again,
When life seemed formed of sunny years,
And all the heart then knew of pain
Was wept away in transient tears!
Our eldest boy, Bob, has been away from us nearly a year at school, and will enter Harvard University this month. He promises very well, considering we never controlled him much.
A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard--by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.
I am fourteen
and my skin has betrayed me
the boy I cannot live without
still sucks his thumb
in secret
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