Quotes About Maturity

Indeed, this is what modern and postmodern masculinity has been all about-men behaving like little boys forever, serving themselves in the name of self-discovery. (Can we imagine someone like Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill talking about going on a quest to find his masculine self? They were too busy changing the world.)

There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.

A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable.

You know, at some point people reach an age at which they can no longer be considered 'promising.' I think it is about the time they turn forty.

I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

Truth is rarely simple and seldom obvious, which is why mature institutions recognise the importance of conflict and disagreement. Christianity was born in conflict, and it has been characterised by conflict ever since. The Church's obsession with heresy is witness to this fact.

There's nothing wrong with civilization. We're just no there yet.

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

I was getting long in the leg but still short on experience.

Nine is the age of great turning. Maybe humanity was a nine-year-old, not yet grown up, not a little kid anymore. Seemingly in control, but always on the verge of rage.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.

But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.

In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.

all mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct.

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As