Quotes About Maturity

I think that to achieve true adulthood is to understand the simplicity of things.

We must try again to be alive to what the people of our country really long for in our national life: forgiveness and grace, maturity and wisdom. ...Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.

Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?

But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.

At eighteen I realized I was eighteen and not so smart, or special and that might have been the only way that I was in fact special. I found my ideas poorly formed and repugnant, my self awkward, and, more or less, for lack of a better word, geeky. In fact my brother, second year medical student that he was, revisited his childhood and, when he passed in the hallway, muttered, "Geek." "It's not my fault," I said.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth

Time is the wisest counselor.

Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.

Time is the wisest counselor of all.

Time is the wisest counsellor of all.

Later it might see moronic, but at that time it all made perfect sense.

I want to age with some dignity.

Experiencing one's own inadequacies and still going on in spite of them are two of the greatest achievements of adulthood.

The best years are when you know what you're doing.

Only now, on the other side of his success, Bruce had come to understand what time and experience can do to the most closely held dreams. The point in your late twenties when you're grown up enough to realize that 'life is no longer wide open'.

Life's full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else [...] In the next few days, you'll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It's learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn't know goose shit from tapioca.

Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

I always looked forward to being an adult, because I thought the adult world was, well—adult. That adults weren't cliquey or nasty, that the whole notion of being cool, or in, or popular would case to be the arbiter of all things social, but I was beginning to realize that the adult world was as nonsensically brutal and socially perilous as the kingdom of childhood.

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race.

The bonds of matrimony are like any other bonds – they mature slowly