Best Adult Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“I think Roald Dahl had the rarest combination of talking to kids about complex emotions, and he was able to show you that the world of kids was sophisticated, complex, and had a lot more darkness than adults ever want to remember.”

“The symbolism of the climate strike is that if you adults don't give a damn about my future, I won't either.”

“Scientists have stated that embryonic stem cells provide the best opportunity for devising unique treatments of these serious diseases since, unlike adult stem cells, they may be induced to develop into any type of cell.”

“Ultimately we have the vision of expanding to a world wide platform that allows kids from the U.S. to go on field trips to China and adults around the world to make friends from different walks of life and people who have different life experiences.”

“I was brought up in the same house I was born in, and I lived there until I left home as an adult. I also went to a Catholic school, which was full of Irish girls whose parents never split up, so everyone I knew had these big family set-ups.”

“I was under the impression that if you've read one vampire series for young adults, you've read them all.”

“Often, adults don't give kids enough credit.”

“Every day, I get e-mails from kids who want a tree - a world away from the adult world.”

“It's the smartphone that has turned adults and children alike into tech-addicted zombies, dumbly swiping and jabbing at their screens, oblivious to the world around them.”

“A lot of negative words adults call the young, like 'naive,' 'impulsive' and 'way too connected online,' are all things we can turn into strengths to help us.”

“I had a lot of issues in my life after my brother died in 1972, that I carried through to my adult life.”

“I just thought to myself, 'What am I doing? Is this how I'm going to live my adult life, banging my head, especially with what I've learned and know about the dangers?'”

“I feel like we have the opportunity as WWE Superstars to make some sort of impact on lives, whether it's one kid or whether it's an adult.”

“Children don't have to suspend disbelief like adults do... their brains can take in whatever crazy magical ideas you throw at them.”

“I wanted to make an adult vampire film, not something for children.”

“I'm not sure I could ever write for adults. That's not to throw shade or anything, but I feel like teenagers are much more open-minded and willing to listen sometimes.”

“To be honest, I was the world's worst vegetarian. You see - I didn't really like vegetables very much. I'd spent most of my childhood terrified of them - horrid bland mushy things. It's only as an adult I realise that part of the problem is my mother's cooking - she hates using salt and has a tendency to overboil things. Thanks, Mum.”

“I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.”

“One of the common myths is that when you have kids you can't really have adult relationships, that kids come first. We don't think so. We actually think that we have to take care of ourselves individually. If we can take care of ourselves, then we can become better partners for our spouse.”

“I myself identify as British-Nigerian, and I'm also gay, and I'm also a young adult in London making music. All of things can co-exist as one.”

“I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.”

“I care so passionately about improving the quality of life for women and girls, not just here in the United States, but internationally as well. I am a single mom and I raised a daughter who is now a young adult.”

“Mass literacy is a phenomenon of the past few centuries, and one that has reached the majority of the world's adult population only within the past 75 years.”

“Everyone needs to act like the adults we are and kindly look the other way if someone is there who they don't like.”

“I love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.”

“You'll move from big brother to the adult world faster by cooking food for your younger siblings while your peers are playing video games.”

“I really like coming-of-age dramas. It's probably the most intense period in anyone's life, those years before you become an adult. Dramatically, there's so much to explore there. And it's nice to be around young talent coming through.”

“Why don't men become primary teachers? Partly, I suppose, because the pay is so insulting; but then it is for all teachers, as the state seems to consider the manufacture of adults less important than the manufacture of just about anything else.”

“I just feel like you have to go through this crazy transition if you're going to continue on with your career from a child star to an adult star.”

“I don't see why it's such a stretch for distributors, buyers, and studios to put cartoon characters into adult situations on film.”

“I think, as you're growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you're an adult. You're ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry are just as deep. We don't feel things more as we get older.”

“Teaching university students affords me the opportunity to demonstrate to young adults that they don't have to be perfect to make contributions to their country.”

“What libertarians assert is simply that differences among normal adults do not imply different fundamental rights.”

“I don't really see any barrier between teenage fiction and adult literature.”

“We lived in one of those half-basement apartments, and on our first night of being in America, someone reached through the grate that protects the window and stole our laundry detergent - which wasn't a big deal, but it felt symbolic when I heard about it later as an adult.”

“Kids should feel afraid of 'Doctor Who.' All the adults I've talked to remember fondly being afraid when they were kids. That's part of the reason they remember it and love it. And if you're afraid in a controlled way, you sort of appreciate fear in some respect.”

“I make M-rated games for adults, you know, with guys wearing sunglasses at night and trench coats.”

“You spend your childhood wanting to get out from your house and wanting to get away and out into the real world, and then as adults, we start to learn that things are not what we thought they were.”

“The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?”

“We adults need to stand up for our kids.”

“Living on the Gulf Coast, we often have to go through dangerous situations, whether you're a child, an adult or a senior citizen.”

“I feel like anything can be worked out; you just gotta talk through it as adults.”

“Where Democrats have a real toehold to criticize Republicans is that families still feel very financially fragile. About 2 in 5 adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency.”

“In some ways, getting published in children's literature is a little more open than publishing adult literature. It's less hinged on who you might know.”

“Once I got my driver's license everybody treated me like I was an adult.”

“There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.”

“I'm not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I'm seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.”

“Whether I'm a bit of an old soul or not, I am who I am, and that doesn't change, whether I'm with adults or with my friends.”

“A huge part of what a kid learns when they're growing up is social and emotional development. As adults, we take it for granted that other people have emotions that are different from ours, and we can identify what they are, but those are skills that children have to learn.”

“Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.”

“Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials.”

“For the vast majority of my adult life, I was a freelance writer, forever scrambling for work that paid an insulting non-amount.”

“From taking photographs of George and Charlotte, I have been struck by the wonderful lack of self-consciousness that you see in photographs of children, without the self-awareness that adults generally feel.”

“Zero-tolerance on drinking and driving - meaning no drinking at all before driving - is a collective punishment that, in essence, only affects responsible adults who follow the law.”

“I think of children's books as not so much for children, but as the filling that goes between the child world and the adult world.”

“We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.”

“When I wrote 'Marley & Me,' I had a clear audience in mind. And it did not include children. I wrote my book for adults and assumed only adults, and possibly teenagers, would be drawn to it.”

“It's weird, the way Kid Rock's going with 'Picture' and the way my stuff is going, too. But I couldn't be happier with the adult contemporary.”

“Adults are just kids who have spent a little more time on this earth.”

“And, as an adult, I tried skiing, and I ended up in tears.”

“Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox.”

“My husband and I met when I was a teenager, and I've been with him for more than half of my adult life.”

“'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.”

“I was interested in watching it; I wasn't interested necessarily in performing. So I'm grateful to kind of find that passion myself, as an adult, because it was really mentally strenuous, and I don't think I would have been mentally equipped for it, honestly.”

“There are thousands of people suffering from ulcerative colitis, from young kids to adults. It's a very difficult illness to deal with.”

“I certainly feel that an adult woman has a right to determine what happens to her life and body.”

“I think I was 13 years old when my father put in my hands 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.' It was the first real adult book I ever read, and it opened a new world.”

“Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.”

“I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.”

“I was thrust into an adult world very quickly, and that can make anyone somewhat socially maladjusted to dealing with people your own age. But I wouldn't trade any of it.”

“I disagree that an athlete can't be intelligent. Some people think that, in basketball, we have a bunch of masculine adults who don't know how to control themselves. They're feeble-minded and can't engage or articulate ideas. That's a narrative they keep trying to paint.”

“Often I think bullying - especially in its adult, verbal forms - is the sort of thing you don't realize till the end of the day, and it's a horrible feeling to realize something wasn't just a bland statement, but was actually cruel. But then we're all capable of - of things that are breathtakingly cruel.”

“Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.”

“I've probably cried with a lot of songs - in teenage crushes, adult crushes.”

“Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing.”

“The voice of a kid can be so much more touching than an adult voice.”

“Public speaking is scary, I think. I've gotten way better at it. If I have to do a speech and be like, 'I'm a YouTuber,' then that's easy, but if I have to get up there and pretend I know something in front of adults, it's never fine. In front of adults, it's like, 'Ahhhh they're going to judge me.'”

“Is my job as a child, even as an adult, is my job to heal the wounds of my parents' childhoods?”

“Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.”

“I started when I was five, and grew up playing against adults and against men most of the time.”

“I know how messy things can get when adults overstep their boundaries and insert themselves - their politics, their fears, their prejudices, their ignorance - into the lives of young people.”

“It was difficult for me to feel my feelings, so I just buried them. Then I found that acting was a way for me to get them out. But now that I'm a reasonably sane adult, acting is more about my trying to engage other people: Acting is cathartic for the viewer as well.”

“Like a lot of other young people, I never thought about health insurance until I got sick. I was 22, and my adult life was just beginning.”

“There's a generation now that didn't grow up in nature. Some of these adults are parents and they know that nature is good for their kids but they don't know where to start.”

“Making a transition to the adult acting industry was pretty smooth for me, and I had a great balance and a great opportunity not to do just children shows.”

“Some of my favorite books to read are young adult books.”

“I was an only child for 16 years. I didn't realize it at the time, but that experience definitely turned me into a people pleaser. I always tried to do what was expected of me, and I constantly sought reassurance from the adults around me that I was doing a good job.”

“Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.”

“And we lost a lot because of that, and I think this is future gymnastics to separate ages. Because kids can do it more than adult. A woman and adult woman can show more than the small kids.”

“When I did finally get to the circus as an adult, I was very impressed by the trapeze artist. But, being 6 feet 3 inches and over 200 pounds, there was no way I could do a trapeze act. If I fell I'd take the catcher with me.”

“I think the principal purpose of education is to allow each of us, when we become adults, to shape our own future.”

“I was really blessed with parents who never said I couldn't do anything. And now I reflect as an adult on that, 'Wow, they never told me no!'”

“There are all kinds of monuments to adults - usually dead and usually white. But we don't often lift up the extraordinary work of children.”

“It is unacceptable that the system we rely on to develop children into well-adjusted, learned, cultured adults allows drones to dominate and increasingly devalues freethinkers.”

“There were some super-lean years, yeah. I'm six feet four. And I entered into this period all of a sudden when I was too big to play a kid and I was too young to play an adult. Like, I couldn't play the lawyer, but I couldn't play the high school kid anymore.”

“It wasn't my intention in going after this part but I suppose now I do. The adult roles are a lot meatier - you're not always just the daughter or the girlfriend or whatever.”

“I was raised with adults. I skipped knowing how to interact as a normal teenage person.”

“There's so much that can influence kids and young adults now, you just have to raise them the best you can and hope they make the right decisions.”

“I think it's a mistake to think, 'Am I going to write a young adult book, or do I desperately want to write a book for adults?' I think the better ambition is to try to write someone's favorite book, because those categorizations of adult, young adult, become kind of superfluous.”

“I don't carry a purse when I fly because I have my Hello Kitty carry-on. I'm the biggest adult supporter.”