Men Growing Up Quotes

#1. I think men, growing up, you have to go through some form of hardship. You've got to harden the metal.

Ice-T

#2. You are not just anyone. One day, you're going to have to make a choice. You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be. Whoever that man is, good character or bad, it's going to change the world.

Jonathan Kent

#3. Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land
too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

Keith Ablow

#4. To a person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.

George W. S. Trow

#5. I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

Augusten Burroughs

#6. But, really, are there any guys out there who aren't jerks? I don't even know any grown-up men who aren't jerks.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

#7. God has not chosen to save us without crosses; as He has not seen fit to create men at once in the full vigor of manhood, but has suffered them to grow up by degrees amid all the perils and weaknesses of youth.

Francois Fenelon

#8. That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

William Butler Yeats

#9. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. When men are growing up and they're reading about Batman, Spiderman, Superman ... those are not fantasies ... they're options.

Jerry Seinfeld

#11. It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

Elizabeth Kostova

#12. We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

Tana French

#13. Unlike most other children, - especially unlike those of today - who are eager to become men and women as speedily as possible, I had a terror of growing up, which became more and more accentuated as I grew older.

Pierre Loti

#14. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior.

Albert Einstein

#15. All the musicians I loved growing up were men. I loved Leonard Cohen, Mick Jagger. I loved Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys. Even today, I love Van McCann from Catfish and the Bottlemen and Matt Healy from The 1975.

Halsey

#16. Where else but in America can a poor black man like Michael Jackson grow up to be a rich white woman?

Red Buttons

#17. Meek young men grow up in colleges and believe it is their duty to accept the views which books have given, and grow up slaves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#18. I always challenged men, in foot races or whatever as a kid growing up, because it was a way of pushing myself and challenging myself against the best - but you have to know and accept that men are born with testosterone. You can beat them for so long, but eventually they'll catch up.

Katie Uhlaender

#19. When you're a kid, somebody's mid-forties, you think they're an old man. Then you grow up and it's like, I was a kid.

Billy Bob Thornton

#20. Manhood had come to him, both in character and demeanour, not as it comes to most young lads, an eagerly-desired and presumptuously-asserted claim, but as a rightful inheritance, to be received humbly, and worn simply and naturally.

Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

#21. Growing up she had become used to allowing men the ability to curve themselves into question marks around her and hold her desperately as if she were the answer. She had become afraid to admit that she is not.

R. YS Perez

#22. Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest because those dreams are necessary goads to leaving home and growing up.

Erica Jong

#23. Strive for excellence in your calling, but as a subsidiary to this: Do not fail to enrich your whole capital as man. To be a giant, and not a dwarf in your profession, you must always be growing. The man that has ceased to go up intellectually has begun to go down.

William Matthews

#24. When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

John Lewis

#25. The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

Erwin Chargaff

#26. When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.

Mart Laar

#27. I was painfully shy when I was younger but at some point you've gotta grow up. I think the genius in the man-boy thing is you tap into a woman's motherly instincts.

Bill Burr

#28. There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

#29. In the matchless gift of His Son, God has encircled the whole world with an atmosphere of grace as real as the air which circulates around the globe. All who chose to breathe this life-giving atmosphere will live and grow up to the stature of men and women in Christ Jesus.

Ellen G. White

#30. Suddenly, Westerns, which were our action films and what the working man went to see to blow off steam and have a good time, became boring to most people growing up from the Eighties on, because they're kind of pastoral.

Quentin Tarantino

#31. Ideas are like beards; men do not have them until they grow up.

Voltaire

#32. Growing up in the '70s, it was only a few years before that when men started to grow their hair long. And in the '70s, people were pushing the envelope a little farther, with men having even more style and piercing both their ears and wearing makeup.

Nikki Sixx

#33. I didn't read comics, growing up. I watched a lot of movies, and those were my comic books. And then, my exposure really increased by becoming affiliated with Spider-Man.

Emma Stone

#34. We have so many young men, especially, who are growing up without their dads. We have to fill that void. We have to do a better job helping young people see what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. And then, somehow, we have to put that family structure back together.

Tony Dungy

#35. The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.

Kelley York

#36. I listened to a lot of Michael Jackson growing up. A lot of Boyz II Men. I loved Mariah Carey. Just big vocalists. I was always that kid who just wore whatever and did whatever.

Justin Bieber

#37. I don't need to convince men that feminism is important, that just isn't a goal of mine. I can't even have that conversation of whether or not it's important, because if someone asks me that ... I don't want to have a conversation with them until they grow up.

Kathleen Hanna

#38. When I was growing up, the men in my life were abusive; women were the ones I ran to for comfort.

Kevyn Aucoin

#39. You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

Edmund Phelps

#40. That which happens to the soil when it ceases to be cultivated by the social man happens to man himself when he foolishly forsakes society for solitude; the brambles grow up in his desert heart.

Antoine Rivarol

#41. A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

Dylan Moran

#42. There weren't really any visible men in my family when I was growing up, but of course there have been men in my life, wonderful men.

Naomie Harris

#43. What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

Gertrude Stein

#44. I have a sort of sisterly feeling toward him [Ben Affleck]. I want him to do well and grow up and be a happy person and a fully realized man.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#45. While I didn't grow up in a family where there was domestic violence I knew of families in my neighbourhood where abuse was happening. I wanted to be part of the Women's Aid Real Man campaign to send out the message that real men don't abuse their partners or their children.

Huey Morgan

#46. With this realization, came a growing need for men and women willing to take up arms in an effort to protect our American way of life and the freedoms so many of our ancestors died to entrench.

Jim Walsh

#47. When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.

Chris Abani

#48. Growing up, I didn't know about families who were missing a father, because there weren't any in our neighborhood. Today over a third of American children are born into single-parent homes. Is this all men's doing?

Timothy J. Russert

#49. When a man's pride is subdued it's like the sides of Mount Aetna. It was terrible during the eruption, but when that is over and the lava is turned into soil, there are vineyards and olive trees which grow up to the top.

Henry Ward Beecher

#50. Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Horace Greeley

#51. I hated the idea of a high school sweetheart. Growing up, oh my God, it just made me sick. I wanted to have a range of cool boyfriends. I wanted to travel around and date these interesting men. Then it just happened. You fall in love.

Charlotte Arnold

#52. Ozzy is a powerful and attractive man. When I grow up I want to be Ozzy.

Ozzy Osbourne

#53. I was forced to grow up quicker than most. I was forced to be a young man at a young age.

Ray Rice

#54. The third thing that men do to get over a break-up. Drinking, not talking about your feelings, and then what?" I said, growing suspicious. "It's fighting, isn't it? You set this up.

Molly Harper

#55. When you're in a broken family and your role model is a violent male, boys grow up believing that's the way they're supposed to act. And girls think that's an accepted way men will treat them.

Jim Costa

#56. When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.

Bruce Beresford

#57. Tut! Magic, indeed! As if there weren't marvels enough without magic. Pictures traveling by telephone, and men bouncing up and down on the moon? Trees and floors and children growing? There are your real marvels.

Jane Louise Curry

#58. The happiest thing that can be said about democracy ... is that it is one of the few systems that has been willing to risk a long period of confusion and mixed purposes for the sake of giving man a chance to grow up in mind and responsibility.

Harry Allen Overstreet

#59. Growing up training, I use to get up so early I would wave to the garbage men going by. So, I had this relationship with Blue Collar America and I really liked it. I felt that lots of those people looked forward to me winning.

Gerry Cooney

#60. When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

Andrew O'Hagan

#61. Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.

John Buchan

#62. Many of the most successful men I have known have never grown up. Youthfulness of spirit is the twin brother of optimism ... Resist growing up!

B.C. Forbes

#63. Jon Snow had dreamed of leading men to glory just as King Daeron had, of growing up to be a conqueror. Now he was a man grown and the Wall was his, yet all he had were doubts. He could not even seem to conquer those.

George R R Martin

#64. The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#65. The only thing I can give to young gay people is that when I was growing up, there were no role models that were blokey that were men. Everybody was flamboyant and camp, and I remember going, 'That's not me, so even though I think I am gay, I don't think I fit into this world.'

Russell Tovey

#66. When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that's up to them.

John Glenn

#67. I surrounded myself with women when I was growing up because I had this horrible psycho father. Now I'm trying to really appreciate and like men more.

Courtney Love

#68. Meek young men grow up in libraries.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#69. There are noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks among the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn.

Charles Dickens

#70. As in labor, the more one doth exercise, the more one is enabled to do, strength growing upon work; so with the use of suffering, men's minds get the habit of suffering, and all fears and terrors are not to them but as a summons to battle, whereof they know beforehand they shall come off victorious.

Philip Sidney

#71. I wanted to show America a different kind of man. If there was someone like me when I was growing up, my whole life would have been different.

Chaz Bono

#72. When I was growing up, it was Clint Eastwood, it was Harrison Ford and Steve McQueen - these guys were tough. They were leading men, but they were also tough and physical.

Joe Manganiello

#73. I didn't have a father growing up, and I was raised with all women, and I didn't really understand men. I thought they were like women, right?

Rene Russo

#74. I never felt I was attractive to women. I felt I was attractive to men when I was growing up. And even now, if a woman fancies me, I find that a bit alienating.

Russell Tovey

#75. Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

Adrienne Rich

#76. I talked about everything, man. I've always written material that everyone can laugh at. I talked about growing up. I did a lot of physical comedy. That was my thing. I was a physical comedian. I did anything and everything from running on a treadmill, I can paint a picture on stage of anything.

J. B. Smoove

#77. My one complaint with my father as a parent is that, not only was he not a golfer, but also he was sort of opposed to golf. I was a country club kid growing up. I should have played golf, but my father thought golf was a sport for old men.

Mike Greenberg

#78. Men at any age truly never grow up. All, no matter what importance they may have attained, are still no more than little boys.

Diane De Poitiers