Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Men are but children of a larger growth.

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!

You understand people better if you look at them-no matter how old or impressive or important they may be-as if they were children. For most men never mature; they simply grow taller.

The more I study men, the more I realize that they are nothing in the world but boys grown too big to be spankable.

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

If you want to learn the true nature of a child you have to watch how she plays. If you want to learn the true nature of an adult you have to watch how she does her job.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child. We just gradually convince ourselves that we have to act more like adults.

Once you realize that everyone is in the same boat, that everyone is just as insecure and childlike as everyone else, that all these jokers in D.C. ruining our world are just greedy kids grabbing for marbles - I think that realization means you're an adult.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

The traits the word 'childish' addresses are seen so often in adults that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking.

I didn't like children. I didn't think of myself as a child. I didn't like any of the things other children were interested in.

The history of the world demonstrates that man becomes what we call civilized by increasing his wants.

Civilization develops man, and if he is, according to his whole character and destiny, made for development, civilization is his truly natural state …

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind.

Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.