quotations about maturity
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
It seldom happens that a premature shoot of genius ever arrives at maturity.
QUINTILIAN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Maturity is not something that can be measured precisely, subjected to experiment, describe in exact quantitative terms, or produced regularly by following a formula. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing exactly whether any person is fully mature, or what the criteria for full maturity should be? In the face of all this lack of precision and objectivity, the concept of maturity nevertheless comes nearer to representing the supreme objective of all educational and advisory programs than does any other goal.
SHALINI WADHWA
The Psychology of Teaching
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
TOM STOPPARD
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Maturity ... is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR.
Cat's Cradle
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
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
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.
ANAÏS NIN
The Diary of Anais Nin
Maturity is only skin-deep, or not even that much. Scratch any man a little bit and you will find childishness arising out of him.
OSHO
Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself
A man's maturity: that is to have rediscovered the seriousness he possessed as a child at play.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
Youth is pliant and elastic; if it receives impressions easily, they are as easily effaced; but maturity is rigid, and admitting them slowly, retains them with a proportionate tenacity.
MARGARET BLESSINGTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Maturity is a measuring rod when it comes to our daily living. It tells us where we are and how far we want to go.
RAMON LUIS OLMOS
Catch the Wave
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Scars fade with time. And the ones that never go away, well, they build character, maturity, caution.
ERIN MCCARTHY
The Pregnancy Test
There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That's the end. That's when the coffin is closed.
BRUCE LEE
The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee
To have maturity is to have power to forgive people that do you wrong.
GARRICK BRIDGEFORTH
Words of the Bible Explained
Sometimes problems don't require a solution to solve them; instead they require maturity to outgrow them.
STEVE MARABOLI
Unapologetically You
That the world can be improved and yet must be celebrated as it is are contradictions. The beginning of maturity may be the recognition that both are true.
WILLIAM STOTT
Documentary Expression and Thirties America