Boy

A boy is a young male human, usually child or adolescent.

A

School boys and discipline are almost by definition at odds with one another.
- William S. Abell, Fifty Years At Garrett Park, 1919-1969: A History of the New Georgetown Preparatory School (1970), p. 115

B

The scouts' motto is founded on my initials, it is: be prepared, which means, you are always to be in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty.
- Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908), pt. 1

And six little Singing-boys,—dear little souls!
In nice clean faces, and nice white stoles.
- Richard Harris Barham, "The Jackdaw of Rheims", in E. C. Stedman (ed.) A Victorian Anthology (1895)

I think that if you had two desert islands, and you put girl babies on one island and boy babies on another island, and they were somehow able to survive with no help from adult society, eventually the girls would cooperate in collecting pieces of driftwood and using them to build shelters, whereas the boys would pretend that driftwood pieces were guns. (Yes, I realize they'd have no way of knowing what guns were. This would not stop them.)
- Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990), pp. 63-64

I feel lucky to be raising a boy now, in this moment. Boys today are on their way to learning a lesson that my generation was never really taught: that every person gets to decide whether they want to be touched or not. A whole army of children across the country are now growing up hearing parents and teachers tell them, over and over, that their bodies are their own. Yes, that means society will hold my son accountable for his sexual behavior in a way that earlier generations never had to deal with. But I don't see that as a loss.
I hope that the growing concern about sexual violence will be accompanied by real change: recognition that our sons need better sex education, earlier, as well as frank conversations about porn, consent, and handling rejection. And I hope now that more people are questioning their assumptions about boys and pushing back against old-fashioned ideas about how we teach them to be men, our sons will have more latitude to explore who they want to be and what life they want to create.
- Emma Brown, To Raise a Boy: Classrooms, Locker Rooms, Bedrooms, and the Hidden Struggles of American Boyhood (New York: One Signal Publishers, 2021), p. 240

A little curly-headed, good-for-nothing,
And mischief-making monkey from his birth.
- Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I (1818), st. 25

C

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), ch. 6

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1872), ch. 1

Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football-pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.
- Charles Causley, "Timothy Winters", Union Street (1958), p. 79

Better build schoolrooms for "the boy"
Than cells and gibbets for "the man."
- Eliza Cook, "A Song for Ragged Schools", in Eliza Cook's Journal, vol. 1 (October 1849), p. 288

Mad about the boy,
It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy.
He has a gay appeal
That makes me feel
There may be something sad about the boy.
- Noël Coward, "Mad about the Boy" (1932)

D

I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.
- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838), ch. 10

You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! And why glorious, my young friend? Because you are capable of receiving the lessons of wisdom, because you are capable of profiting by this discourse which I now deliver for your good, because you are not a stick, or a staff, or a stock, or a stone, or a post, or a pillar.
O running stream of sparkling joy
To be a soaring human boy!
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), ch. 19

E

The overall effect of Hitler Youth membership, some Social Democratic observers complained, was a ‘coarsening’ of the young. The suppression of any discussion or debate, the military discipline, the emphasis on physical prowess and competition, led boys to become violent and aggressive, especially towards young people who for whatever reason had not joined the Hitler Youth. Hitler Youth groups travelling by train amused themselves by insulting and threatening guards who failed to say ‘Hail, Hitler!’ every time they asked a passenger for his ticket.
- Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939 (2005), p. 280

G

Boys always play better when they know the girls are watching.
- Edgar Graham Gammon, 15th President of Hampdeny-Sydney College (1939-1955), writing in 1903, when he was a student at Hampden-Sydney in the Class of 1905. As quoted by John Luster Brinkley in On This Hill (1994), p. 431

The only thing about a classroom more important to adolescent boys than whether girls are present is whether or not it is on fire.
Advocates of coeducation will tell you that the boys are learning to regard the girls as "human beings" rather than as sexual objects. These are the kinds of people who imagine that most males anywhere, under any circumstances – short of affliction by senility, homosexuality, or Bella Abzug – ever refrain from regarding females as sexual objects. These are the "imaginative" types of people who run our schools. They tend to think that their sexual interest in budding adolescent girls is their own secret perversion. It happens to be shared by the boys in the school (as well as by all the other male teachers).
If the educator is particularly creative and imaginative, he will suppose that these young "human beings" are learning a lot about life in their work together. What in fact the boys are learning is that unless they are exceptionally "bright' and obedient, they will be exceeded in their studies by most of the girls. Unless you are imaginative, you will see that this is a further drag on their already faltering attention to Longfellow's Evangeline. Clearly in a losing game in masculine terms, the boys react in two ways: They put on a show for the girls and dominate the class anyway, or they drop out. Enough of them eventually drop out, in fact, to disguise the otherwise decided statistical superiority of female performance in school. But they do not drop out soon enough to suit educators for whom aggressive boys are the leading problem in every high school.
- George Gilder, Sexual Suicide (1973), pp. 207-208

H

Huc venite iuvenes ut exeatis viri.
- Come here as youths so you may leave as men.
- Motto of Hampden-Sydney College

The boy stood on the burning deck
  Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
  Shone round him o'er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
  As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
  A proud though child-like form.
The flames rolled on—he would not go
  Without his Father's word;
That Father, faint in death below,
  His voice no longer heard.
- Felicia Hemans, "Casabianca" (1826)

When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves.
- George Herbert, "Mortification", The Temple (1633)

Where the pools are bright and deep,
Where the grey trout lies asleep,
Up the river and over the lea,
That’s the way for Billy and me.
- James Hogg, "A Boy's Song", Songs and Ballads by the Ettrick Shepherd (1852) p. 196

When you can't do anything else to a boy, you can make him wash his face.
- E. W. Howe‎, Travel Letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913), p. 120

Without plenty of sleep, at least three hours of it before midnight if possible, no boy is going to go far in athletics.
Overstraining is simply trying to do too much. A boy's constitution will not stand nearly as much physical effort as a man's in spite of the fact that a boy's competitive spirit flares just as brightly. No boy under sixteen should attempt to run farther than one mile or compete in more than two hard races in one meet. Younger boys do not have to go through the rigid training program intercollegiate athletes undertake because a boy's muscles are naturally more supple and his body in better general physical condition, thanks to the surprising amount of out-of-door walking, running, jumping, swimming, pulling, pushing and stooping boys do every day. Boys under sixteen should concentrate on acquiring form in their events rather than gaining razor-edge physical trim. A short period of special drill and speed sharpening is all they need before a meet.
- Harold Keith, Sports and Games (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), p. 241

Boys should not be afraid that running will give them a weak heart or shorten their lives. Statistics prove that longevity has favored the athlete.
- Harold Keith, Sports and Games (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1941), p. 241

Boys everywhere are quick to recognize and respect any kind of talent in each other, and one of Will Rogers' best talents was talking.
- Harold Keith, Will Rogers, A Boy's Life (1937)

L

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "My Lost Youth", Birds of Passage (1893), p. 41

M

His body was as straight as Circe’s wand;
Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpassed
The white of Pelop's shoulder. I could tell ye
How smooth his breast was and how white his belly;
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back.
- Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598), First Sestiad

Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his doubt whispered. Grown men know better.
- George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1998), Theon (I)—Theon Greyjoy

What boy does not wish to find secret powers hidden in himself?
- George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1998), Bran (IV)–Maester Luwin

Every boy needs schooling in virtues in order to become a great man. And any parent can school him because at the heart of virtue is masculine intuition. Parents don't have to construct the virtues and then pour then into the heart of their son. The virtues are there, but in small fragments that must be cleaned, shaped, and polished.
- Meg Meeker, Boys Should Be Boys (2008), p. 204

The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,
In the ranks of death you'll find him,
His father's sword he has girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him.
- Thomas Moore, "The Minstrel-Boy", Irish Melodies (1821), p. 115

N

No one has the right to make a boy learn Latin, because learning is a matter for individual choice; but if in a Latin class, a boy fools all the time, the class should throw him out, because he interferes with the freedom of others.
- A. S. Neill, Summerhill (1960)

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble, or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton, just before his death, as quoted in The Annual Review, and History of Literature for 1806, Vol. V (1807), Ch. 14, Art. XIV (Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton by Edmund Turnor), p. 471

To date, there are still very few published discussions of young boys' constructions of masculinity that unpack the heteronormativity in which it is produced. While some of the primary-school studies have explored how homophobic cultures operate to marginalize boys who are alternatively masculine and thus "feminized" and "homosexualized" via various forms of name-calling, very little research attention has focused on the diversity and ambiguity of boys' heterosexual cultures.
- Emma Renold, "Primary School 'Studs': (De)constructing Young Boys' Heterosexual Masculinities", reprinted from Men and Masculinities, Volume 9, Number 3 (2007), 275-297 in Michael Kimmel and The Stony Book Sexualities Research Group (eds.) Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and Society, 2nd ed. (2015), p. 79

O

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
- Wilfred Owen, "Arms and the Boy", Poems (1920)

R

Boys and girls should be taught respect for each other's liberty; they should be made to feel that nothing gives one human being rights over another, and that jealousy and possessiveness kill love.
- Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order (1932), p. 31

S

What are little boys made of?
Snips, snails
And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of.
- Attributed to Robert Southey, "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" (c. 1820s)

Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games.
- Robert Falcon Scott, last letter to his wife, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, vol. 1 (1913), ch. 20

V

O formose puer, nimium ne crede colori.
- O charming boy, trust not too much in thy beauty.
- Virgil, Eclogues (37 BC), Book II, line 17 (tr. John Martyn, 1820)

Macte nova virtute, puer, sic itur ad astra.
- Blessings on your young courage, boy; that's the way to the stars.
- Virgil, Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IX, line 641 (ODQ, 3rd ed. 1979)

External links

Encyclopedic article on Boy on Wikipedia
The dictionary definition of boy on Wiktionary