Quotes tagged as "maturity" Showing 1-30 of 980
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
tags: aspiration, assurance, beauty, clouds, color, conviction, inspirational, maturity, sunset
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis
“Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
tags: maturity, understanding
“The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?”
― Gordon B. Hinckley, Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes
tags: forgiveness, maturity, mercy
“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, Letter to My Daughter
tags: adulthood, growing-up, life, maturity
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
tags: adult, childishness, maturity
“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“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. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories
tags: growing-up, idealism, maturity
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
tags: acceptance, maturity, uncertainty
“You are never too old to become younger!”
― Mae West
tags: maturity, paradox, poetry, story, story-telling, youthfulness
“Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.”
― Hermann Hesse, Gertrude
tags: existence, existentialism, maturity, youth
“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner
“There are some questions that shouldn't be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers.”
― Anne Bishop, Daughter of the Blood
“I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander
tags: coming-of-age, graduation, growth, insight, maturity, teenager, young-adult
“The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.”
― John C. Maxwell
“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind
tags: life, maturity, melancholy, suffering
“Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
tags: humor, imitation, maturity, originality, plagiarism, writing
“To be of good quality, you have to excuse yourself from the presence of shallow and callow minded individuals.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson
tags: alone, bad-company, bad-friends, bad-influence, be-yourself, behaviour, believe-in-yourself, callow, childishness, company, etiquette, good-behaviour, good-quality, immature, immaturity, maturity, mediocre, mediocrity, negative-influence, negative-people, outstanding, peculiar, peculiarity, presence, quality, sensitivity, single, stand-alone
“Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.”
― M.J. Croan
tags: adolescence, growing-up, maturity
“That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food.
Adults are the death of hope.”
― Peter David, Tigerheart
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or
an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
tags: conformity, maturity, pace
“Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger
“The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy
“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
― Karl Popper
“There's truths you have to grow into.”
― H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham
tags: disillusionment, maturity
“People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe
“I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?”
― Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures
“Scars fade with time. And the ones that never go away, well, they build character, maturity, caution.”
― Erin McCarthy, The Pregnancy Test
