150+ Growing up Quotes and Sayings to Inspire You Positively

Growing Up Quotes

  • “You must pay the penalty of growing-up. You must leave fairyland behind you.” —L.M. Montgomery
  • “Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework, never finished.” —Lois McMaster Bujold
  • “I reckon responsible behavior is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.” —Terry Pratchett
  • “It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.” —Helena Bonham Carter
  • “Growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.” —Cassandra Clare
  • “I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.” —John Green
  • “Life has a funny way of turning you into the one thing you don’t want to be.” —Jonathan Levine
  • “Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.” —M.J. Croan
  • “When I was young, I used to wish I would fit in… I’m glad I didn’t get my wish.” —Steve Maraboli
  • “It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.” —Roddy Doyle
  • “Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you’re young. But I don’t think we make any fewer when we’re grown up.” —Jodi Picoult
  • “Part of growing up is just taking what you learn from that and moving on and not taking it to heart.” —Beverley Mitchell
  • “That’s the trick of growing up. Nothing stays the same. Hook sounded oddly sympathetic. You see the faults in everything. Including yourself.” —Austin Chant
  • “I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.” —Roger Zelazny
  • “The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the core of strength within you that survives all hurt.” —Max Lerner
  • “That’s one of the things we learn as we grow older, how to forgive. It comes easier at forty than it did at twenty.” —L.M. Montgomery
  • “You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • “Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest, learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.” —Jodi Picoult
  • “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.” —James Baldwin
  • “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” —J.D. Salinger
  • “One of the oddest things about being grown-up was looking back at something you thought you knew and finding out the truth of it was completely different from what you had always believed.” —Patricia Briggs
  • “I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we’re going to have to define differently what I’m going to be. We’re going to have to define my growing up differently.” —Mattie Stepanek
  • “When you were too young and naive to see the risks, I incurred your wrath to protect you. Scream at me for it if you must. Thank me for it when you finally grow up.” —Karen Marie Moning
  • “I still don’t know what it really means to grow up. However, if I happen to meet you, one day in the future, by then, I want to become someone you can be proud to know.” —Makoto Shinkai
  • “When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.” —Patrick Rothfuss
  • “Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.” —Johanna de Silentio
  • “For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • “I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.” —C. JoyBell C.
  • “The right thing to do is so easy to see when you’re seventeen years old and don’t have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you’re grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn’t a tidy little arrow pointing to it.” —Huntley Fitzpatrick

Inspirational Growing Up Quotes for Your Son and Daughter

  • “If you are to be, you must begin by assuming responsibility.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  • “Turning I would do I did is the grammar of growing up.” —Anthony Marra
  • “Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.” —Chinese Proverb
  • “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” —C. S. Lewis
  • “Don’t grow old to give up and don’t give up growing up.” —Bernard Kelvin Clive
  • “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” —Lewis Carroll
  • “It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.” —M. Scott Peck
  • “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” —E. E. Cummings
  • “You grow up the day you have your first real laugh – at yourself.” —Ethel Barrymore
  • “You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.” —Abraham Lincoln
  • “That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget.” —Walt Disney
  • “We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.” —May Lamberton Becker
  • “Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.” —Russell Baker
  • “One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us.” —Virgil A. Kraft
  • “Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.” —Judd Nelson
  • “If you’re gonna screw up, do it while you’re young. Older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.” —Winston Groom
  • “Age is a necessary but insufficient requirement for growing up. There are immature old people, and there are appropriately mature young people.” —Henry Cloud
  • “Children who grow up with plenty can learn to give, just as children who grow up receiving love can learn to express it.” —Fred Rogers
  • “Part of growing up is realizing you learn to love so many people. It’s about forming those relationships and finding what will last forever.” —Dylan O’Brien
  • “You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they’re going.” —P. J. O’Rourke
  • “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” —Anne Frank
  • “Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.” —Bell Hooks
  • “I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.” —Jennifer Elisabeth
  • “I think she is growing up, and so begins to dream dreams, and have hopes and fears and fidgets, without knowing why or being able to explain them.” —Louisa May Alcott
  • “Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.” —Maya Angelou
  • “Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers; the next day you’re gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul.” —Kevin [The Wonder Years]
  • “If your life is a blank page, that only means you have room to write your story. You have the power to tell that story the way you want to.” —Thea Harrison
  • “In this day and age, some turn 18 and think they’re a man or a woman and that’s it, but that’s just not true. You have to establish your manhood or your womanhood with actions.” —Orlando McGuire
  • “As children, we don’t get to pick the ways in which we’re loved. But then we grow up, and if we’re smart and prepared and very determined, every once in a while we actually do get the life we wanted.” —Oprah Winfrey
  • “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” —Carl Jung
  • “It happens to everyone as they grow up. You find out who you are and what you want, and then you realize that people you’ve known forever don’t see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.” —Nicholas Sparks
  • “You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.” —Charlotte Eriksson

Quotes About Kids Growing Up

  • “Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience and pimples.” —J.M. Barrie
  • “If you’ve never been hated by your child, you’ve never been a parent.” —Bette Davis
  • “It happens before you know it, the handprints become higher and higher, and then they disappear.”
  • “I regret not having had more time with my kids when they were growing up.” —Tina Turner
  • “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” —Dr. Seuss
  • “Children do learn what they live. Then they grow up to live what they’ve learned.” —Dorothy Nolte
  • “You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.” —John J. Plomp
  • “To be able to watch your children’s children grow up is truly a blessing from above.” —Byron Pulsifer
  • “I don’t want my kids growing up believing that there is nothing destructive in the world.” —Chuck Connors
  • “There is nothing more special than seeing your kids grow up to be the best person they can be.”
  • “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” —Pablo Picasso
  • “Remember, the goal is not to raise great kids; it’s to raise kids who become great adults.” —Andy Andrews
  • “We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.” —Stacia Tauscher
  • “As your kids grow they may forget what you said, but won’t forget how you made them feel.” —Kevin Heath
  • “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.” —Robert Brault
  • “The empty nest comes quickly. Do not squander your most precious privilege of participating in the lives of your children.”
  • “You can’t stop your children from growing up, but you can be present so you don’t miss your children growing up.”
  • “While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.” —Angela Schwindt
  • “Divorce is one of the key predictors of poverty for a child growing up in a home that’s broken.” —Mike Huckabee
  • “Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.” —Phyllis Diller
  • “Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time.” —Ali ibn Abi Talib
  • “There no perfect parents, and there are no perfect children, but there are plenty of perfect moments along the way.” —Dave Willis
  • “Once a mom, always a mom. No matter how grown the kids are, they will always be your precious babies in your eyes!”
  • “I think the actual moment of growing up happens when you stop wanting to grow up and start wishing you were a kid again.”
  • “One of these days we’re gonna have to grow up, have to get real jobs and be adults, someday, just not today.” —Kenny Chesney
  • “Don’t waste time trying to be the perfect parent or raising perfect kids, instead connect, love, cherish and live the time you have together.”
  • “Children are the Shades of both mother and father, whether poor or rich everyone had a wonderful creative life growing up with them.” —Kishore Bansal
  • Sometimes the only way to get over the sadness of your kids growing up is to rest in the beauty of the people they are becoming.”
  • I constantly go between wanting you to stay my little baby forever and being excited about all of the amazing things you’ll do in this life.”
  • “I want my kids to have the things in life that I never had when I was growing up. Things like beards and chest hair.” —Jarod Kintz
  • “If your days as a mother seem long and mundane, remember that ity is but a short breath before their wings are ready and they take flight.”
  • “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” —Albert Einstein
  • “Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.” —Ally Condie
  • “I’ve screwed everything up royally. I remember you saying that growing up happens when you start having things you look back on and wish you could change.” —Cassandra Clare
  • It would be easier to never let it rain on our children but it would not be kind for they would grow up believing every drop could wash them away.”
  • “I wish I could freeze time or go back in time and watch my kids grow up all over again because it is just going by too fast.” —Robert Rodriguez
  • “Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway.” —B. B. King
  • “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.” —Keith Richards
  • “Cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow for babies grow up we’ve learned to our sorrow. So quiet down, cobwebs-dust, go to sleep. I’m rocking my baby, and babies don’t keep!” ―Elizabeth
  • “We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.” —Neil Degrasse Tyson
  • “You won’t remember the way I would hold your little feet in my hands, imagining how much bigger than my own feet they will one day grow, and how I will have to let you go.”
  • “When raising a child, you never seem to realize that the little person is growing a little more every day. And one day, you see him as a gentleman and be proud of who you have raised.”
  • “Initially I started in theatre as a Shakespearean actress before film and television. I’ve always been an artistic child growing up and I knew I wanted to act for as long as I can remember.” —Lorraine Toussaint
  • “Our children are only ever lent to us. We never know just how long we will be able to keep them for. So kiss them, cuddle them, praise them and hold them tightly. But most of all… tell them you love them everyday.”
  • “I don’t want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had – Plato’s white grandfatherly god – because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can’t trust him with your kids.” —William P. Young
  • “As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.” —Robin G. Collingwood
  • “Growing up is never straight forward. There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you’ll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing that there’s nothing you can do except watch them.” —Alden Nowlan
  • “I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.” —Maya Angelou

Short Quotes about Growing Up

  • “Son, you outgrew my lap, but never my heart.”
  • “Those little feet, won’t be little forever.” —Ashlee Edens
  • “Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.” —Chili Davis
  • “Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.” —Mark Twain
  • “The trick is growing up without growing old.” —Casey Stengel
  • “Growth is the only evidence of life.” —John Henry Newman
  • “Growing up is hard. Otherwise everyone would do it.” —Kim Harrison
  • “Born to be wild – live to outgrow it.” —Lao Tzu
  • “Kids grow really fast, all adults face problem in growing up.”
  • “I think people make their own faces, as they grow.” —Enid Blyton
  • “Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.” —Kim Harrison
  • “Let’s learn to grow up, before we grow old.” —Martin H. Manser
  • “When kids grow up wanting to be you, you matter.” —Seth Godin
  • “To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter.” —Euripides
  • “Motherhood: the days are long but the years are short.” —Gretchen Rubin
  • “Even though you’re growing up, you should never stop having fun.” —Nina Dobrev
  • “Everything will change. The only question is growing up or decaying.” —Nikki Giovanni
  • “Don’t try to make me grow up before my time.” —Louisa May Alcott
  • “I was the one in charge of the kids growing up.” —Robert Rodriguez
  • “I think the arts are very important for children growing up.” —Stephen Schwartz
  • “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.” —Virginia Woolf
  • “You can get what you want or you can just get old.” —Billy Joel
  • “I make mistakes growing up. I’m not perfect; I’m not a robot.” —Justin Bieber
  • “How amazing it is that children grow up in the blink of an eye!!!”
  • “There are only 940 saturdays between a child’s birth and her leaving for college.”
  • “You have a lifetime to work, but children are only young once.” —Polish Proverb
  • “Sometimes you have to grow up before you appreciate how you grew up.” —Daniel Black
  • “There are two gifts we should give our children, one is roots the other is wings.”
  • “No one tells you that the hardest part of motherhood is when your kids grow up.”
  • “The great paradox of parenting is that it moves in both slow motion and fast speed.”
  • “Hold on to the tiny moments and cherish the little snuggles… They grow up so fast!”

Growing up Quotes and Sayings

  • “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
  • “This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible.” —Michelle Tea
  • “Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.”
  • “I had a lot of growing up to do. A lot of times, I learned the hard way.” —Allen Iverson
  • “Until you’re grown-up they send you to reform school. After you’re grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.” —Ernest Hemingway
  • “I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.” —Jodi Picoult
  • “I know that in my past I was young and irresponsible – but that’s what growing up is. You learn from your mistakes.” —Lindsay Lohan
  • “If growing up is the process of creating ideas and dreams about what life should be, then maturity is letting go again.” —Mary Beth Danielson
  • “Sometimes we’re so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up.” —James Dobson
  • “If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up, never grow up, and never grow up! Not me.” —J.M. Barrie
  • “Everything I was afraid of when I was growing up, I’ve become. I’ve taken on my nightmares, like the devil and the end of the world, and I’ve become those things.”
  • “No matter where you are or where you grow up, you always go through the same awkward moments of being a teenager and growing up and trying to figure out who you are.” —Aimee Teegarden
  • “Too many people grow up. That’s the real trouble with the world, too many people grow up. They forget. They don’t remember what it’s like to be 12 years old. They patronize, they treat children as inferiors. Well I won’t do that.”
  • “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.” —Spike Jonze
  • “We had so many dreams as children. Where do they go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust, for new children to find and take up?” —Helen Hollick
  • “Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We’ll be different. We’ll be adults–cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, and well-defined slopes.” —Lauren Oliver
  • “Growing up is never easy. You hold on to things that were. You wonder what’s to come. But that night, I think we knew it was time to let go of what had been, and look ahead to what would be. Other days. New days. Days to come. The thing is, we didn’t have to hate each other for getting older. We just had to forgive ourselves… for growing up.” —The Wonder Years