Adult Life Quotes

Your children should have it impressed upon them that their adult life-style will bear very little resemblance to yours and that they should now be acquiring knowledge, skills, values, and tastes that will sustain them in less materially affluent circumstances. On the other hand, the fresh insights and imaginations of your children may help you find a viable future while there's still time. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

If Guy had been asked at any point in his entire adult life prior to this week how he might envisage himself speaking to Sir Philip Rookwood, "planning illicit amours" would have been the least likely answer imaginable, matched only in its implausibility by "up a tree". ~ K.J. Charles

I spent most of my adult life in relationships some good, some bad. It took years for me to realize that I was the common denominator in all of these relationships and I needed to love me first. ~ Sanjo Jendayi

It's been very hard, after being mostly a mom, to develop an adult life of my own. And not being married anymore, I have to come up with challenges. ~ Danielle Steel

We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. ~ Alain De Botton

The new concept of the child as equal and the new integration of children into adult life has helped bring about a gradual but certain erosion of these boundaries that once separated the world of children from the word of adults, boundaries that allowed adults to treat children differently than they treated other adults because they understood that children are different. ~ Marie Winn

The only insult I've ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, "Do you have a hobby?" A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?! ~ John Waters

The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. ~ William Golding

To view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible. The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign, you can never leave. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine - people you've hurt don't forget. And at the back of your mind is the ~ Terry Hayes

When you've done something for more than a third of your life, your whole adult life, and then all of a sudden you're going to have to switch off and say, 'No more,' you want to grasp as much of it and enjoy the last few years of it as much as you can. Because you can't get those years back. ~ Brian O'Driscoll

My father, whom I implicitly believed, represented adult life as one of incessant drudgery under the continual threat of financial ruin. ~ C.S. Lewis

As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I'd resided my adult life. ~ David Mixner

My eyes have really only been opened since you came into my world. You gave me everything. You made me really want to see what was around me, for the first time in my adult life. You made me want you. You made me want ... a life. You were my greatest give of all, Ethan James Blackstone." She reached up to touch my face and held her palm there, her eyes showing me so much of what she felt.
I covered her palm on my cheek with my hand. "As you were for me, my beautiful American girl. ~ Raine Miller

To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[ ... ] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death. ~ Salman Rushdie

It was interesting, how much of adult life consisted of pretending. ~ Kevin Canty

Now, I meant to talk about something else earlier on, and I've forgotten what it was. I've remembered what it is again, but I've also forgotten. And that's really what adult life is like most of the time. ~ Dylan Moran

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind. ~ Caroline Knapp

'Marnie' was ahead of its time. People didn't talk about childhood and its effects on adult life. It was taboo to discuss sexuality and psychology and to put all that into a film was shocking. ~ Tippi Hedren

Mr. Denzi can teach us all something about accumulating wealth. Begin earning and investing early in your adult life. That will enable you to outpace the wealth accumulation levels of even the so-called gifted kids from your high school class. Remember, wealth is blind. ~ Thomas J. Stanley

I have been a parent since I was 25. That's a large chunk of my adult life. Mother or father, it transforms you completely. ~ Kate Winslet

For most of my adult life, I have been an emotional hit-and- run driver
that is, a reporter. I made people like me, trust me, open their hearts and their minds to me, and cry and bleed on to the pages of my neat little notebooks, and then I went back to a safe place and made a story out of it. ~ Anna Quindlen

It made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I'd been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any movement blow me part. ~ Donna Tartt

I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has. ~ Amy Bloom

Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death.
And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see. ~ Martin Amis

At school, I decided I wanted to be a director and then I went out and spent the rest of my adult life trying to be a director. It was really clear to me. So in that sense I was very lucky. ~ Stephen Daldry

Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he'd spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan's idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London's tangle of streets was inscrutable. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as thespecial responsibility of mothersany shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood. ~ Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr. Chamberlain? Mac didn't care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that's why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. ~ Michael Dobbs

My maternal grandmother was the longest-lived of my grandparents. She migrated to Australia in her 80s and lived into her 90s. It was great that she got to be part of my adult life. ~ Nick Earls

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life. ~ John Barth

For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback. ~ Michel'le

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. ~ Erik Larson

When will we learn that childhood is in a great sense not simply a preparation for adult life but a thing unique and complete in itself - a masterpiece of God. ~ Carl Schmitt

I have been an atheist my entire adult life. I do not proselytize, however. Nor do I question the faith of others. I just don't want to be obliged to accept someone else's faith as a factor in my government. ~ Jack Germond

Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I'd think how girls' coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there's no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there's waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16. ~ Mark Leyner

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.

But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.

She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

The more intelligent and competent a woman is in her adult life, the less likely she is to have received an adequate amount of romantic attention in adolescence. ~ Susan Jacoby

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn't like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. ~ Stephen King

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. ~ David Foster Wallace

Girls ... were allowed to play in the house ... and boys were sent outdoors ... Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning how to solve problems through negotiation and roleplaying. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? ~ Garrison Keillor

When I was a kid, I used to escape from my family with my imagination, and I kept this spirit into my adult life. This doesn't always happen. All children have imagination, but for some it doesn't carry over. ~ Jean-Pierre Jeunet

I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me. ~ Lorna Luft

In the ambiguity and shifting playing field of adult life, I often wish I could just fill in a dot and have someone say "Yes" and hand me a chicken leg, or "No" and slap me with an old fish. ~ Rob Delaney

I have never been proud of America my entire adult life. ~ Michelle Obama

RIE emphasizes the benefits of infants spending peaceful, uninterrupted time following their biological rhythms of falling asleep when sleepy and eating when hungry, rather than their having to adjust too soon to external schedules and unrealistic expectations. First, we have to let the child develop his own rhythm; and then later he can adjust more into adult life. ~ Magda Gerber

Violent men unknown to me have occupied my mind all my adult life ~ Michelle McNamara

Yes, my dolls were the beginning. Obviously there was a convulsive flavor to them because they reflected my anxiety and unhappiness. To an extent they represented an attempt to reject the horrors of adult life as it was in favor of a return to the wonder of childhood, but the eroticism was all-important, they became an erotic liberation for me. ~ Hans Bellmer

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down ... I was a very public failure. ~ Steve Jobs

Adult life is terrible, Hazel. Never grow up.
Everything's complicated, and there are too many rules ... ~ Bryan Lee O'Malley

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words. ~ Shirley Jackson

Howie was unburdened with human ties or responsibilities. He bounced around from one loser job to another, his adult life spent in and out of trouble, jail and the workhouse without a care in the world. Howie ~ Dennis Carstens

My entire adult life has been devoted to family and career, each adding to the other in many rewarding ways. I have never felt that I had to set a pattern for my writing and teaching. ~ Sonia Levitin

I don't know much about Britain. I've been working overseas for most of my adult life. So I'd like to see what sort of problems there really are here. It's a question of asking, 'Where are we going, how purposeful are we?' And see if there's anything that can be done to find possibilities for change. ~ Rory Stewart

John had been a footman nearly all of his adult life. He knew decorum and appropriate behavior for his situation. But when he glanced from one twin to another, he nearly ruined his reputation and self-respect forever with...a smile. ~ Sarah Brazytis

For the first half of my adult life, I was a Democrat. ~ Alphonso Jackson

I want to tell this right. I was thirty-eight years old. I had spent my entire adult life reading meanings into other people's stories, finding the figure in the carpet, the order in things. God in the details and no place else. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Our culture has the expectation that the memories of a happy childhood will somehow ground you and prepare you for adult life. But what about the memories that cut, that wound, that won't heal? ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I sometimes felt guilty about betraying Dumbledore's trust, of course he had admitted me to Hogwarts when no other Headmaster would have done so, and he had no idea I was breaking the rules he had set down for my own and others' safety. He never knew I had led three fellow students into becoming Animagi illegally. But I always managed to forget my guilty feelings every time we sat down to plan our next month's adventure. And I haven't changed."
Lupin's face had hardened, and there was self-disgust in his voice. "All this year, I have been battling with myself, wondering whether I should tell Dumbledore that Sirius was an Animagus. But I didn't do it. Why? Because I was too cowardly. It would have meant admitting that I'd betrayed his trust while I was at school, admitting that I'd led others along with me and Dumbledore's trust has meant everything to me. He let me into Hogwarts as a boy, and he gave me a job, when I have been shunned all my adult life, unable to find paid work because of what I am. ~ J.K. Rowling

I spent most of my adult life looking for romantic love. ~ Daphne Zuniga

Well, when people ask where I'm from, I usually say the Midwest, because that covers both homes, in a way. Obviously I was born in Omaha, but when people say, "Where do you come from," we'll say Milwaukee. I mean Jennifer was certainly born in Milwaukee, and that's where I spent a big chunk of my adult life, so we usually say we came here from Milwaukee. That's usually how it's referenced is we're from Milwaukee, yeah. ~ Peter Buffett

I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent. And I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point. ~ Janet Reno

This quick foray onto the toilet has been no different an endeavor than any other time I've used the restroom in my adult life. Try then to imagine my surprise when instead of the waste going down the u-bend like the thousands of times previous, the bowl's contents go not gentle into that good night.
Instead, they shoot directly up at me ... at approximately 80 miles an hour.
As I leap backward, slamming into the glass shower door, the only thought going through my now-banged head is, When did I eat corn?
Pretty in Plaid: A Life, a Witch, and a Wardrobe, or, the Wonder Years Before the Condescending, Egomanical, Self-Centered Smart-Ass Phase ~ Jen Lancaster

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life ... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world. ~ Gaston Bachelard

You give a lot of great advice about what to do. Do you have any advice of what not to do?


Don't do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don't stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don't fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don't focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore. Don't seek joy at all costs. I know it's hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it's not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do - have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself - as I did every damn time - the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I'm learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I've still got work to do. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process. ~ Carl Jung

I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine. ~ Andrew Wiles

My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time. ~ Jonathan Franzen

At some point in your adult life, you've probably walked into a party and felt a frisson of relief upon discovering at least one woman there who was fatter, uglier, and/or dressed more inappropriately than you. We sure have. But if you want to have any hope of making peace with your own body, you need to knock that shit off.

We're not even telling you to stop just because it's nasty, petty, and beneath you to judge other women so harshly; it is, but because you're not a saint, and neither are we. We're telling you to stop because it's actually in your own self-interest to stop being such a bitch. 'Cause you know what happens when you quit saying that crap about other women? You magically stop saying it about yourself so much, too.

Judging other women negatively creates a constant stream of nasty thoughts in your head. It is inevitable that you will end up applying those same standards to yourself. We think we're building ourselves up when we do this but, really, we're just tearing other people down to our level. And we hate to go all Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood on you, but tearing other people down isn't really productive. It leaves you in the same place you started, which is full of loathing for your own body. ~ Marianne Kirby

God knows, I'm no expert on relationships, but I do know when something's good. And this thing we've created between us is precious and rare. I only hope it's not fleeting, because for the first time in my adult life, I've given someone the power to hurt me. ~ Linda Castillo

Parents are led to believe that they must be consistent, that is, always respond to the same issue the same way. Consistency is good up to a point but your child also needs to understand context and subtlety ... much of adult life is governed by context: what is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another; the way something is said may be more important than what is said ... ~ Stanley Greenspan

Having a husband and kids isn't a prerequisite to having a well-rounded, fulfilling adult life anymore. ~ Aziz Ansari

To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

As I said, I spent most of my adult life thinking I didn't have a vote, and therefore that what I thought didn't matter. ~ Two Chainz

The church is a place where you can walk in and close your eyes and all the complex and inscrutable troubles of adult life are gone for a time. But you have to be careful to keep your eyes closed, because if you open them, what you'll see all around you are sad, middle-aged people with brittle hair and long faces, faces as old as your own, looking weary from that crooked road that God keeps promising will someday be made straight and trying to wish the world away with a children's song. Of course, if they all wish together, the wish comes true for a while. ~ Matt Taibbi

Archer tries not to think of his own state of purity, physically unsullied, yet now spiritually beyond redemption, his thoughts plagued by lithe limbs and brilliant blue eyes. Doctor Archer has never really understood women, nor has he ever had time for courtship; this is a sacrifice he has willingly made for his career. He thought - believed - for most of his adult life that his vocation was to tend the sick of mind. Romance was a frivolity, carnal urges something he successfully sublimated, resisting the drive to spoil himself. Now, in the overbearing loneliness of his 4am bed he touches himself in secret, panting and hungry and stunned by shame ~ John T. Fuller

I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life. ~ Neil Kinnock

Obviously as a kid, for probably anybody who chose animation voiceover as a career in their adult life, Mel Blanc was the touchstone for everybody. He kind of invented the job and was the first voice actor to get onscreen credit. ~ Tom Kenny

Resentful of her own repressive Catholic upbringing, she'd avoided church altogether in her adult life, and now she was dying and I didn't even have God. ~ Cheryl Strayed

It's taboo to admit that you're lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven't left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.

A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn't transition well to adult life, that you'd fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it's happening.

Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you're some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. "Getting old ain't for sissies," your father tells you wearily.

You wish they'd stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you're not taking advantage of your youth.

You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger's bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constan ~ Ryan O'Connell

How had he got here? Only a few minutes ago he'd been a kid, riding his bike to school, collecting comics, doing homework and watching TV. Over the years, a few trappings of adulthood had insinuated themselves into his life withoutmaking significant inroads. Real adult life seemed to exist over there, somewhere as distant and unreachable as Uranus. He had no idea how people crossed over to this place, or why - the demands of being grown up seemed exhausting. Look how I work all the time. See my silky girlfriend. Watch me exchange money for food. Admire my blood pressure. ~ Meg Rosoff

You've spent your entire adult life worried about what would happen to the people around you if you died that you forgot to live."
"I've done what I thought was right."
"Yeah, and how's that working for you?"
To think I called him for support. "You should be a motivational speaker, Dreamboat, or maybe a therapist because you're super fucking helpful. ~ Corinne Michaels

It has taken me most of my adult life to come to terms with who I am. To do that, I had to break free of attitudes that brought me down. ~ Janet Jackson

While I've lived in cities for most of my adult life, I really prefer the quiet, boring, mundanity of the country. It's the best place for me to work, think, and invent. ~ Jacob Hashimoto

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window.
Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second. ~ Craig Ferguson

It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological ...
[A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. ~ Anthony Storr

I'm not alone in having spent my adult life only pursuing positions or projects I knew I'd ace. So many women stick to doing only the things at which they excel, rarely going beyond what makes them feel confident and comfortable. ~ Reshma Saujani

I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days during their early adult life. Darkness would make them more appreciative of sight; silence would teach them the joys of sound. ~ Helen Keller

All my adult life, there was the Troubles. That was the backdrop of my life. ~ James Nesbitt

I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life. ~ Richard Dawkins

At every moment of life the civilised man is hedged about by restrictions of impulse: if he happens to feel cheerful he must not sing or dance in the street, while if he happens to feel sad he must not sit on the pavement and weep, for fear of obstructing pedestrian traffic. In youth his liberty is restricted at school, in adult life it is restricted throughout his working hours. All this makes zest more difficult to retain, for the co ntinual restraint tends to produce wearin ess and boredom. Nevertheless, a civilised society is impossible without a very considerable degree of restraint upon spontaneous
impulse, since spontaneous impulse will only produce the simplest forms of social c ooperation, not those highly complex forms which modern economic organisation demands ~ Bertrand Russell

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah?
Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it. ~ Mark Manson

A man who has spent most of his adult life trying out a series of patent medicines is always an optimist. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

For most of my childhood and adult life, I thought I had the answers and most of the world was just lost. As I've grown, I've learned that I know almost nothing. And so, in that I feel reborn in a sense. ~ Leah Remini

I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself - as I did every damn time - the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. ~ Cheryl Strayed

I have been very lucky for most of my adult life to be working as an actor. ~ Josh Hopkins

I was born in a hurricane in Pensacola, Florida ... my dad was in the military, so we moved all over the place. But I consider myself a southerner from Louisiana. I've lived in Texas for most of my adult life. ~ Kimberly Willis Holt

He could not even take comfort in knowing that he had spent most of his adult life in dread of calamities had not materialized, because, by the law of averages, one of them was bound to come true one day. ~ J.K. Rowling

I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it. ~ Cheryl Mendelson

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. ~ Mortimer J. Adler