Quotes About Maturity

For children love is a feeling; for adults, it is a decision. Children wait to learn if their love is true by seeing how long it lasts; adults make their love true by never wavering from their commitment.

The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

Isn't that what it means to be civilized? That you can wait to get what you want?

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares.

I came because I've spent my whole life in the company of the brother that I hated. Now I want a chance to know the brother that I love, before it's too late, before we're not children anymore.

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

It didn't matter he was brilliant and dedicated and good. He was a child. He was young. No he isn't, thought Ender. Small, yes. Bur Bean has been through a battle with a whole army depending on him and on the soldiers that he led. and he performed splendidly, and the won. There's no youth in that. No childhood.

Before we are citizens, he thought, we are children, and it is as children that we come to understand freedom and authority, liberty and duty. I have done my duty. I have bowed to authority. Mostly. And now, like Russia, I can set aside those burdens for a little while and see what happens.

Human beings remain grubs all the lives.

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings.

I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.

But always a giant, long before his body showed it.

Nothing that is new is ever new twice. While things that are true are still true the next time; truer, in fact, because they have been tested, they have been tasted, and they are always ripe, always ready...

Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.

They came for gossip, and he gives them responsibility.

I'll talk to her, but she's too old—or too young—to listen to reason.

I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't commanders, they don't rule over forty other kids

Children couldn't stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.

Wasn't that the definition of adulthood? That you wanted one thing, but did another because you knew what was right and good, and wanted to do the right and the good more than you wanted to do what you wanted.

Children never do understand their own childishness. Then

Children never do understand their own childishness.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

Wisdom comes with winters