G. Stanley Hall Quotes

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

The man of the future may, and even must, do things impossible in the past and acquire new motor variations not given by heredity.

Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of childhood; oneness with childhood is the glory of the Teacher.

Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.

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.

Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

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.

.. every step of the upward way is strewn with wreckage of body, mind, and morals.

Adolescence as the time when an individual ‘recapitulates’ the savage stage of the race’s past.

Dancing is imperatively needed to give poise to the nerves, schooling to the emotions, strength to the will, and to harmonize the feelings and the intellect with the body that supports them

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.

The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.

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.

Puberty for a girl is like floating down a broadening river into an open sea.

Abundance and vigor of automatic movements are desirable, and even a considerable degree of restlessness is a good sign in young children.

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.

This splendid subject [mathematics], queen of all exact sciences, and the ideal and norm of all careful thinking.

Daily contact with some teachers is itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a spoken precept. Here, too, the real advantage of male over female teachers,especially for boys, is seen in their superior physical strength,which often, if highly estimated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of their moods and their discipline.

All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development.

There is no more wild, free, vigorous growth of the forest, but everything is in pots or rows like a rococo garden... The pupil is in the age of spontaneous variation which at no period of life is so great. He does not want a standardized, overpeptonized mental diet. It palls on his appetite.

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will. They have built all the roads, cities and machines in the world, written all the books, spoken all the words, and, in fact done everything that man has accomplished with matter. Character might be a sense defined as a plexus of motor habits.

Civilization is so hard on the body that some have called it a disease, despite the arts that keep puny bodies alive to a greater average age, and our greater protection from contagious and germ diseases.