John Stuart Mill

Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by the mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in existence.

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto, 1988, vol. 10, pp. 212-213