G. Stanley Hall > Quotes

“Gross well says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth.”
― G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence - Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion

“People don't quit playing because they grow old. They grow old because they quit playing.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession." ~ G. Stanley Hall”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born." ~”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor developments.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Constant muscular activity was natural for the child, and, therefore, the immense effort of the drillmaster teachers to make children sit still was harmful and useless.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment." ~”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Life is . . . a stream flowing from high mountain ranges which wring it from the clouds, coursing down through all the manifold ways in which the water comes down at Lodore to the sea of eternity. Adolescence is the chief rapids in this river of life which may cut a deep canyon and leave its shores a desert.”
― G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, sex, Crime, Religion and Education Volume v.2

“Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“.. every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Education has now become the chief problem of the world, its one holy cause. The nations that see this will survive, and those that fail to do so will slowly perish. . . . There must be re-education of the will and of the heart as well as of the intellect; and the ideals of service must supplant those of selfishness and greed.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“The teens are emotionally unstable and pathic. It is a natural impulse to experience hot and perfervid psychic states, and it is characterized by emotionalism. We see here the instability and fluctuations now so characteristic. The emotions develop by contrast and reaction into the opposite.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.”
― G. Stanley Hall

“The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.”
― G. Stanley Hall