G. Stanley Hall quotes

G. Stanley Hall was an American psychologist and educator, recognized as a pioneer in child and adolescent psychology. His work helped establish psychology as a scientific discipline in the United States. He became the first president of the American Psychological Association and deeply influenced the study of human development. Here are 13 of his quotes:

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

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

Being an only child is a disease in itself.

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

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

G. Stanley Hall

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.

G. Stanley Hall

War has given applied psychology a tremendous impulse. This will, on the whole, do good, for psychology, which is the largest and last of the sciences, must not try to be too pure.

G. Stanley Hall