H. L. Mencken Quotes

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

I generally don't think one's age is all that meaningful - there are 50-year-olds who still act and think like children.

I’ve aged, but I don’t think I’ve grown up.

Men are but children of a larger growth.

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.

When you're physically growing up, you develop emotionally with that.

I think I've just matured over the years.

I have met a lot of guys in their 40s who have the maturity of a 15 - year-old and men in their 20s who have older sensibilities. They just need to live in their own apartment. That's kind of a deal breaker.

Though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.

Treasures are not for youth; at twenty years of age, one does not know how to be rich, or how to be loved.

To partly remain a child: that is to be really mature.

Act your age don't pretend to be older than you are give yourself time to grow

Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.

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.

It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.

Everyone is a poet at 16, but how many are poets at 50? Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical.

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

I'm fascinated in the children within adults.

Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.

I think Jennifer Lawrence is that inside of herself. As long as I've known her she's been both 10 years old and 50 years old. And we've watched her grow up since she walked on "Silver Linings Playbook" as a 20-year-old and had not been - "Hunger Games" had not come out. And I've watched her have to take on and deal with a great deal of attention and resources and people.

It's not only children who grow. Parents do too.

From forty to fifty a man is at heart either a stoic or a satyr.