The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch.

The older I get, the more I realize that I am not just the student, but I am my own teacher as well.

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can’t...

There is a greater Christian faith than one which settles for the temporal happiness, and that is the augmentation of faith. The more faithful you become, the harder the obstacles get; but the harder the obstacles get, the tougher your spine grows; and the tougher your spine grows, the less dependent you are on man’s...

I called his broken promise heartbreaking, and he called it growing up. Oh, that’s mature—blame it on maturity.

I’m not the same person I was when I wasn’t. I’m different now, in that now I’m drinking coffee.

Maturity dare to be the first to shine as a light in the dark.

Stop thinking like Alice in Wonderland, Celia told herself sternly. You’re a grown-up, it’s no use shutting your eyes, wishing things would happen

Conversions were easy, but making full-time disciples was hard.

As his children, we were treated as some species of migrant workers who happened to be passing through. My father was the only person I ever knew who looked upon childhood as a dishonorable vocation one grew out of as quickly as possible.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either...

I can teach you how to respect but self-respect is self taught.

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up.

Change takes time. It takes time for the seeds to begin growing within, time to understand and process, time for the growth to mature, and time for the old self to die and fall away.

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly,...

You may be temporarily young, but you’ll forever be childish.” Then I put gum in her hair.

There’s no incentive to go into that longer maturity now.

Just out of high school, you didn’t realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.

Young girls are like helpless children in the hands of amorous men, whatever is said to them is true and whatever manipulation on their bodies seems like love to them, sooner or later, they come back to their senses, but the scars are not dead inasmuch as her spoiler lives.

Childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.

The only relationships that exist are based on truth. Everything else is just a mutual and isolating delusion.

It’s really nice to see him mature and handle pressure and try to be a positive influence to everyone who is around him. I think he is getting there. That’s the joy of teaching high school kids, seeing that maturity when you have seen them struggle in the past and then they get it together...

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

There is no night porter wandering about in King’s. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.

Children’s and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that’s why so many adults read YA: we’re never done coming of age.

Maturity is when we can differentiate between our wants and needs and treat them as such.

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his...

As a writer of philosophy, it’s good to ask oneself, ‘Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?

Being nice to someone who did you foul in the past is kinda like a mature way of getting revenge because it sometimes confuses the hell out of them & brings them to the realization that they no longer can manipulate your emotions with their actions…something they thought they’d always be able to do.

There was that word again.Mature. Was this what maturity was? Giving up on the things we wanted because we knew we’d never get them?

To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration...

Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.

is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unlesslaughter can be said to remedy anything.

I’m not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic – the part of you that you treasure most – to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but...

There’s a difference, you know, between faith and playing make-believe. One will make you grow. The other one will make you sleep.

maturity”, animated lives around him, it might be said that Reverend Gwyon had reached maturity.

One day I finally decided, that there is no point sharing my feelings, You don’t enjoy…

Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.

…I have decided that I shan’t sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to work my ass off… and whenever the opportunity arises… dance my ass off. … As someone very smart once wrote,...

You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

In a general sense, I admit to valuing the worldviews of men under the age of 40 and women over the age of 30.

It takes maturity and practice and patience to spread chunky peanut butter evenly on crumbly bread.

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And...

Was she insane?! She would lose her head before she was 20!

Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.

Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

College was to teach me that I was one of life’s journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts.

Memory changes as a person matures.