Quotes About Maturity

I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.

Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement. The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony; and this dull content is unworthy of man. History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations of and awkwardness of youth pass into the ease and order of maturity.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

Youth is the age of extremes: "if the young commit a fault it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration." The great difficulty of youth (and of many of youth's elders) is to get out of one extreme without falling into its opposite.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

a man's maturity pays the price of his youth.

The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth.

But before twenty is the joy of the body, and after thirty is the joy of the mind; before twenty is the pleasure of protection and security; and after thirty, the joy of parentage and home. How

Vanity increases with age.

we must not expect the world to improve much faster than ourselves

Age has a way of giving humans a gravitas that they haven't earned. Like most people, I have essentially the same personality I had at twenty-two. But because a decade has passed since then, I'm given more authority now. I'm thought of as wiser. I'm not. The same shit will happen in another decade. I'll still be the same guy. But "wiser." And as much of an idiot as ever. I like it. I could get used to this adult business.

El mejor vino es el más viejo, la mejor agua es la más nueva.

Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity

any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child's fringe has something suspect about him

age and learn to breathe again

She was herself in that moment of life when, to the middle-aged observer, at least, a woman's looks have a charm which is wanting to her earlier bloom. By that time her character has wrought itself more clearly out in her face, and her heart and mind confront you more directly there. It is the youth of her spirit which has come to the surface. I

I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

Civilization begins with distillation

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.

It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don't really know what they mean.

I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.