“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)
Original
Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.
Le Petit Prince (1943)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 38
French writer and aviator 1900–1944Related quotes
Source: "What I’ve Learned: Padma Lakshmi" in Esquire https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a37862708/padma-lakshmi-what-ive-learned-interview-2021/ (2 November 2021)
“grown-ups always say that things are complicated.”
Jonah Ryan, Chapter 37, p. 336
Variant: I don't want to be a grown-up. … Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated.
Source: 2000s, A Bend in the Road (2001)
interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 208-209
Context: God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out.
“Some mothers will do anything for their children, except let them be themselves.”
Cut It Out (2004)
Source: Wall and Piece
The Silver Chair (1953), Ch. 16: The Healing of Harms
The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956)
"On Three Ways of Writing for Children" (1952) — in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1967), p. 25
Context: Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.