"Second childhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the latter society is the best proof of the wisdom which guided the councils of the Royal. At present, the various societies exist with no feelings of rivalry or hostility, each pursuing its separate objects, and all uniting in deploring with filial regret, the second childhood of their common parent, and the evil councils by which that ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... eccentric egotism. That is a risk which I am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and especially on this page. As I have said, the whole business of actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. But at least I am called upon to do a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that trivial specialism ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... not earlier be relieved from our dreadful situation. My father had become strong enough to go about and take care of himself, but his mind was feebler, and he seemed more like an old man in his second childhood than one in the prime of life as he was. He was not troublesome to any one, nor was there any fear of trusting him by himself. He was only like an imbecile old man—and such even the ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... poisoned arrows, and of clubs, on which, with the microscope, may be detected the hairs of missionary martyrs. In fine weather, of course, these attractions would be advertised in vain; but the fact is, our whole community has been reduced by the cruelty of the elements to a sort of second childhood; the rain which permeates everything is ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... similar evidences that man has ever reached the summit of civilisation on this continent, or search, without our reward, for the path by which he has made the downward journey to his present condition of second childhood." ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything. What does it matter to you whether anything is true or not? your flesh is as grass: you come up like a flower, and wither in your second childhood. A lie will last your time: it will not last mine. If I knew I had to die in twenty years it would not be worth my while to educate myself: I should not bother about anything but having a ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... man retaining all the energy, but not the rashness of youth; age with vigour instead of decrepitude, delighting in the words of sound wisdom rather than the usual tattle of second childhood; and, withal, an old man who is prone to moralise as old men are; a man able and willing to do his duty in the present though his heart is left in the past; such is the most prominent figure in these poems. He is pourtrayed as of tall, athletic frame and kingly port, his majestic front and hoary ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various
... the pictures painted by the imagination,—the faded frescos on the walls of memory,—come out in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier. Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is one which she reserves for our second childhood. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... everything to which man had been wont to put his hand would appear to bear the impress of some other hand; and a hundred avenues of thought opening to his bewildered sense would consign his inward man to the education of a second childhood. ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... Badger is in his second childhood," said Arnold, trying to make light of the affair; "he must mean ...
— Leslie Ross: - or, Fond of a Lark • Charles Bruce
... to approve of my laying up treasure. I breathe delight with every waft of fragrance, and though you may not believe it, the natural has a charm for me. I have been slowly studying it for a year. Is it a symptom of second childhood,—this love of olden pleasures, this longing to retrace?" and she raises her slow-moving eyes, letting them rest a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of 1796 that the calamity befell which has tinged the story of Charles and Mary Lamb with the sombrest hues of the Greek tragedy. The family were still in the Holborn lodgings,—the mother an invalid, the father sinking into a second childhood. Mary, in addition to the burden of ministering to her parents, was working for their support ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... Chinaman, the pantaloon of civilization. How useful he has been to us for our farces, our comic operas! This yellow baby, in his ample pinafore, who lived thousands of years ago, who has now passed into this strange second childhood. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... thought," I answered, rudely, for I was getting desperate. "You've no right to keep me here like this, and it won't do you a bit of good, for if you stand there till we're both in our second childhood, I won't change my mind. You ought to know that now, Mr. Parker. Please let ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... some musical instruments—notably those of the violin—but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge. Most of the music in vogue there is the same that those pianos prattled in their innocent infancy; and there is something very pathetic about it when they go over it now, in their asthmatic second childhood, dropping a note here and there ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Lord Privilege the justice to state that he evidently was fast verging to a state of second childhood. He was much bowed down since I had last seen him, and appeared infirm in ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... this time, bub, that I'm in my second childhood, and playing dime novel. But there are some things in politics that have to be done as gentle and careful as picking a rose petal off a school-ma'am's shoulder." The Duke chuckled and smoked for a time. "When I've had a job of that sort to do I haven't ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... has any brain or heart in it. The feeble Lives of feeble-minded Christians, written by feeble-minded authors, and published by feeble-minded publishers,—we all know the spoon-meat that multitudes of our people go down to their second childhood upon. Jonathan Edwards—a name they never hear at home, but one of the most masculine and seraphic of interpreters—has a noble discourse on The Importance and Advantage of a thorough Knowledge of Divine Truth. "Consider yourselves," he says, "as scholars ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... intellect. The careless good humor that had prompted him to accept the trust of the dead man had given place to a fixed habit of melancholy. The firm, vigorous intellect had overripened into the mental mellowness of second childhood. His broad understanding had narrowed to the accommodation of a single idea; and in place of the quiet, cynical incredulity of former days, there was in him a haunting faith in the supernatural, that flitted and fluttered about ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... should be near you, but terribly far away from your thoughts all the while. Still, you will be near. You will be very beautiful, Mary, riding up the trail through the pines, with all the scents of the evergreens blowing about you, and I—well, I must go back to a second childhood and play a ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... if you call that young, and in his second childhood. An Atheist, too. Tom Payn, Colonel Ingersoll, Viscount Amberly—those are his gods, the pagan! I'd burn him on a tar-barrel if I had my way. It's a pity we don't stick to some ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... companions and friends are completely forgotten or only recalled after much thought and assistance in the way of suggested associations. Then again, do we not witness a complete forgetfulness in cases of very old people who relapse into a state of "second childhood," and who then live entirely in the present, the past having vanished for them. There are cases of people having grown old, and while retaining their reasoning faculties, were as children, so far as the past was concerned. A well-known writer, when in this ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... advance in years, the necessity for sleep; however, diminishes, until they come to maturity, when it remains for many years nearly stationary. In advanced age, the necessity for sleep again increases, till we reach the extremest old age, or what is usually called second childhood, when we again sometimes ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... I, for that matter," replied the duke, with some pride. "I never do. If there's one animal alive I loathe it's a valet. I learned to dress myself at an early age and was supposed to do it decently. I may be in my second childhood, but I've not go so far as being ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... he will take charge of her, if she is overtaken by her second childhood whilst he is there. Meanwhile, she is in charge of herself, is she not? And there is hardly any danger of her ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... hour-glass into the abyss as having no need to turn it longer to number the indistinguishable ages of Annihilation. It was a favorite speculation with the learned men of the sixteenth century that they had come upon the old age and decrepit second childhood of creation, and while they maundered, the soul of Shakespeare was just coming out of the eternal freshness of Deity, "trailing" such "clouds of glory" as would beggar a Platonic year ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... denoting persons who have been always frivolous and childish, or those who have passed into second childhood. 'On the shelf' is a common saying of ladies when they are ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to pass, the monarch died; and Poor Rozoko, now reduced to second childhood, wailed most dismally:—no one slept that night in Hooloomooloo. Never did he leave the body; and at last, slowly going round it thrice, he laid him down; close nestled; and ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... wishes and wants attended to. Their company is sought by the young, to whom their conversation is considered an honour. Their advice is asked on all occasions, their words are listened to as oracles, and their occasional garrulity, nay even the second childhood often attendant on extreme old age, is never with the Indians a ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... pie. But the Secretary was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory. Yet continually, when he ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... man's being so pleased to think that you, who were a perfect stranger to him, had been made an officer of the Legion of Honor! Perhaps it was a mere whim on his part, for he is falling, they say, into second childhood, but I love him for showing ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... said. "Glad to see you again. I won't offer to shake hands—mine are covered with glue." He smiled in the whimsical humorous way that always went straight to another man's heart. "We're all returning to our second childhood up here, you see!" He indicated the model. "This is my device for keeping out of mischief. When finished I hope it will fill a similar role for the benefit ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... working lips,—in that unearthly gravity which has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance in a dozen it may reach by and by. The boys had remembered the old man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life. There came to him a fair, silver goblet, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the daughter of a summer night, born where all the birds are free, and the moon christened you with her soft light to dazzle the eyes of man. Not our little minister alone was stricken by you into his second childhood. To look upon you was to rejoice that so fair a thing could be; to think of you is still to be young. Even those who called you a little devil, of whom I have been one, admitted that in the end you had a soul, though not that you had been born with one. They said ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... to talk to the poor, like, after their own fashion. But the minute an ould man sees you, sir, he believes that you MEAN it, sir, whatever it is. For an ould man somehow comes to know things like a child. They call it a second childhood, don't they, sir? And there are some things worth growin' a child again to ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... had brought it to a spot, where such lingering propensities were easily fanned by every passing circumstance, fanned and fed, until the broad flame was forced to burst out afresh, and consume the harshness and bitterness that had once dwelt with them. Her former virtues budded now anew into a second childhood, adorning her advancing years with gentle, lovable, womanly attributes, that endeared her to every one she knew, and rendered her indispensable to Honor who had learned to find in her all the qualities of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... as though I were having my second childhood. It was so nice to be at college that term with the grown-up girls, and now I have to go with infants like little Hilda and Gertrude, only not so nice. I had first year Math in High School, you know, last year, and my German Prof regarded me as a babe and wouldn't let me read things ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... poisoned in every spring, and poured forth like water! Neither do we remember all the steps, marked by desolation, crime, and bloodshed, by which this barren summit has been reached. Take the history of any civilized state,—England, France, Spain before she rotted back into second childhood, the Italian Republics, the Greek Commonwealths, the Empress of the Seven Hills—what struggles, what persecutions, what crimes, what massacres! Where, in the page of history, shall we look back and say, 'Here improvement has diminished the sum of evil'? Extend, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Thicker, faster, Pin by Pin; Pins a-piece to see his Show; Boys and Girls flock Row by Row; From their Cloaths the Pins they take, Risque a Whipping for his sake; From their Frocks the Pins they pull, To fill Namby's Cushion full. So much Wit at such an Age, Does a Genius great presage. Second Childhood gone and past, Shou'd he prove a Man at last, What must Second Manhood be, In a Child so Bright ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... for her? Would he never be further healed, and at last see her and love her? And she dreamed of once again being his healer, of accomplishing by the sole power of her little hands the cure of the second childhood in which he remained. She could clearly see that there was no spark in the depths of his grey eyes, that his was but a pallid beauty like that of the statues which had fallen among the nettles of the flower-garden. She rose and clasped him, breathing on ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... more fortitude in scenes of trial and distress. Their thoughts are, moreover, less engrossed by the cares of business, and by other objects, than those of our sex. They seem formed for days, and months, and years of watchfulness—not only over our earliest infancy, but also over our first and second childhood. And it were strange indeed, if nature, in qualifying them for all this, had not qualified them to watch over us during the few short years ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wrapped in a white sheet by way of cloak, and turning carefully on the embers a slice of the mare. Philippe saw upon his face the joy these preparations gave him. The Comte de Vandieres, who, for the last few days, had fallen into a state of second childhood, was seated on a cushion beside his wife, looking fixedly at the fire, which was beginning to thaw his torpid limbs. He had shown no emotion of any kind, either at Philippe's danger, or at the fight which ended in the pillage of the carriage and their ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... occupations, and, whatever its relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life. Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from childhood to second childhood. We live in such a concatenation of things,—our hopes, fears, loves, hates, struggles, sympathies, defeats, and triumphs make such a medley, with a sort of divine fascination about it,—that we are always interested to hear how anybody has borne himself through whatever varieties of fortune. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... long. Out in California we're going to come into a sort of second childhood, be perennials like those larkspurs I had in the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... so called, are stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all: as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being. And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood, just ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... was said I do not know, for I left the spot as quickly as possible, making an inward resolution to avoid all picnics in the future till I should arrive at my second childhood. ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... it, and absently tore it into little pieces, and threw the pieces on the floor. Mr. Balch watched him in consternation. He began to think the report that Jethro had reached his second childhood was true. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... humouring me again. I have been wracking my brains in vain to remember what exactly DID happen yesterday. I feel as if it was all sunk oceans deep in sleep. I get so far—and then I'm done. It won't give up a hint. But you really mustn't think I'm an invalid, or—or in my second childhood. The truth is,' he added, 'it's only my FIRST, come back again. But now that I've got so far, now that I'm really better, I—' He broke off rather vacantly, as if afraid of his own confidence. 'I must be getting on,' he summed up with an effort, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... he was really unwilling to venture out in the dark. "I'll see you safe across the churchyard," he said; "and the vicar's servant will see you safe back." The tone in which he spoke instantly roused Sir Joseph. "I am not in my second childhood yet, Richard," he replied, testily. "I can find my way by myself." He kissed his daughter on the forehead. "No fear, Natalie. I shall be back in time for the mulled claret. No, Richard, I won't trouble you." He kissed his hand to his sister and went out into the hall for ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... impossible; the radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary function of sex-force vitalization, not procreation; the art of transmutation and the key to the gate of life; the esoteric meaning of our "second childhood;" the present necessity for physical old-age; the spiritual message in the doctrine of sacrifice; the mystical formula for transmutation; the mystery of the "Holy Grail" elucidated; the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Greece, the most intellectual of all nations of all times, died in mental senility of moral paralysis. Of Socrates's and Plato's "following after truth" nothing remained but the gossipy curiosity of a second childhood, living only to tell or to hear some new thing. And the schools of philosophy were closed because they had nothing to tell which was worth the knowing or hearing. All the wealth of the world was poured into Rome, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... characteristics of senility. These characteristics are as definitive as those of childhood or of sex, and to overlook them may lead to serious consequences. We shall not consider that degree of old age which is called second childhood. At that stage the question seriously arises whether we are not dealing with the idiocy of age, or at least with a weakness of perception and of memory so obvious that they ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of blanc-mange, custards, &c. and the endless and useless collection of puerile playthings for the palate (of first and second childhood, for the vigour of manhood seeketh not to be sucking sugar, or sipping turtle), is scrupulously exact, even to a grain, in his ingredients; while cooks are unintelligibly indefinite, although they are intrusted with the administration of our FOOD, upon the proper quality and preparation of which, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... of him, as if he were her son. He was in his second childhood, no doubt. And Madame Jordan said she appeared to hold herself accountable for the losses and crosses that made him so fretful. The children of the emigration were brought up to hardship, and accepted everything as their elders could ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... well-beloved disciple and friend Wasianski with a faithful and pathetic minuteness which, in the view of some of the great thinker's deepest admirers, might well have been less microscopic. The spectacle of a great mind losing itself at length in the feebleness of age, almost the imbecility of second childhood, might well, they consider, have been withdrawn from the vulgar gaze. "Yet," as the late Prof. Wallace most truly remarks, "for those who remember, amid the decline of the flesh, the noble spirit which inhabited it, it is a sacred privilege to watch the failing life and visit ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... also liked old men. But, between fifty and seventy, he saw little to approve of in the dark sex. They had lost their good looks if they ever had any, their wits were on the wane, and they were invariably selfish. When they attained second childhood, the charm often returned. Age was frequently beautiful, wisdom appeared like an aftermath, and the heart which seemed dry and deadened suddenly ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Britannula. They think,—poor ignorant fighting men,—that such a theory can be made to perish because one individual shall have been mastered. But no! The idea will still live, and in ages to come men will prosper and be strong, and thrive, unpolluted by the greed and cowardice of second childhood, because John Neverbend was at one time ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... were with fetters on his legs, he went. After having accomplished the military enterprise entrusted to him, he fell into a lingering fever, at the termination of which he was so much reduced that he was only kept alive by milk, which he drank from a woman's breast. Such was the gentle second childhood of the man who had almost literally been drinking blood for seventy years. He died on the 12th ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... seem to keep out of it. It takes a hold on a man that I never could get away from; and when I reach my second childhood and the boys have turned me out, I reckon I'll potter along trying to look knowing and secretive, like the rest of the has-beens, letting on as if I still had a place inside. Lord, if I'd put in the energy at my business that I've frittered away on small politics! ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... not the hen who desires to set for the purpose of getting out an early edition of spring chickens that I am averse to. It is the aged hen, who is in her dotage, and whose eggs, also, are in their second childhood. Upon this hen I shower my anathemas. Overlooked by the pruning hook of time, shallow in her remarks, and a wall-flower in society, she deposits her quota of eggs in the catnip conservatory, far from the haunts of men, and then ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... which the Greek schism affords the specimen. Either a state of deadness and mechanical action, or a restless ebb and flow of opinion and sentiment, is the symptom of that intellectual exhaustion and decrepitude, whether in politics or religion, which, if old age be a second childhood, may in some sense be called barbarism, and of which, at present, we are respectively reminded in China on the one hand, and in some southern states of Europe ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... brethren, some two hundred years ago, had a hearty laugh, which their successors have often re-echoed; they said that helpless suckling and its priests put them so much in mind of their own old man, surrounded by his cardinals, he! he! Old age is second childhood." ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... about a week back. He was huntin' you or Orcutt. He told me how you beat old John McNabb out of his pulp-wood—almost. You ought to be ashamed—a couple of up-to-date financiers like you two, pickin' on an' old man that's just dodderin' around in his second childhood." ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... lines the copied Virgilian cadence is united with the directness and the real or assumed simplicity which belongs to the second childhood of Latin literature, and which is so remarkable in the authors who founded the new style. The new style itself was also largely practised, but only a few scattered remnants survive. Tiberianus, Count of ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... second childhood now, judgin' by the way he acts sometimes. It was Isaiah of course! Who else would be walkin' around downstairs this time ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln |
