once a man, twice a child

once a man, twice a child

1. A man is born as a child, grows to adulthood, and consequently enters old age, when he deteriorates and reverts to a childish state.
   • 1889, Oscar Fitzalan Safford, Hosea Ballou: a Marvellous Life-story, Universalist Publishing, Boston, p. 243 (Google books):

     "I am an old man," he said; I avail myself of the privilege of an old man—, to be a child. ‘Once a man, twice a child.’"

   • 1971, Plays and Players, Issue 19, p. 64 (Google snippet view):

     Dora: Once a man, twice a child, my mother used to say.

     Ansell: What did she mean by that?

     Dora: She meant that a man grows from a boy, to a man, to a boy again.

   • 2005, Camyl Sosa Belanger, Eva Gabor, an Amazing Woman, →ISBN, p. 201 (Google preview):

     The child in people sometimes comes out after one reaches a certain stage in life, which makes the saying, “Once a man twice a child” to be the truth.

• once a man, twice a boy

• once a woman, twice a child

• retrogenesis
• second childhood