Maturation Quotes

Pain is nothing but growth waiting for us to give it permission to grow us up.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

In our formative years, every person begins creating a self that can keep him or her company through later stages in life. It requires concentrated effort to create self-hood. The task of creating a fully developed human being is an ongoing process, an open-ended assignment. The goal of self-hood is to evade slipping into a state of thoughtlessness, where we fail to take ownership of our thoughts, deeds, and lifestyle.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.

~ Thomas L. Friedman

The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Lily appeared, wearing her nightclothes, in the doorway. She gave an impatient sigh. 'This is certainly a very LONG private conversation,' she said. 'And there are certain people waiting for their comfort object.'Lily,' her mother said fondly, 'you're very close to being an Eight, and when you're an Eight, your comfort object will be taken away. It will be recycled to the younger children. You should be starting to go off to sleep without it.'But her father had already gone to the shelf and taken down the stuffed elephant which was kept there. Many of the comfort objects, like Lily's, were soft, stuffed, imaginary creatures. Jonas's had been called a bear.Here you are, Lily-billy,' he said. 'I'll come help you remove your hair ribbons.

~ Lois Lowry

Undergoing personal change is a difficult but necessary process of maturing into the ultimate manifestation of a desirable self. True personal transformation requires a person honestly to assess their inner spirituality and adopt a clear vision of who they want to be. An earnest person experiencing inner transformation of their values and belief system is apt to feel conflicted, confused, and disorientated. Change of self is displacement, disarticulation, and loss of self. Alteration of our self-image results in disrupting, dislocating, and modifying a person’s perspective of what is significant.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle. The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We script our own psyche. We each journey alone. The path that we take through life proves to be every person’s supreme test of mental, physical, and emotional stamina, and the final determiner of his or her intellectual, ethical, and spiritual attainment.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

~ Maureen Corrigan

Lincoln Road that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, takes them unawares. The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty. Lincoln wrote that sorrow is most difficult for the young because it, takes them unawares. The old, he said, have learned to anticipate difficulty.

~ Richard Brookhiser

Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

~ Sherry Turkle

If boys would think, it would be well to give them less classwork and more opportunity for thought.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

Every child matures, which is both a blessing and a damn shame. Children can imagine worlds that never exist, worlds far more interesting and consoling than an adult knows.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

They worried that fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical realities.

~ Ransom Riggs

In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.

~ Charles Dickens

It is only when you suffer that you truly understand.

~ Jules Verne

It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To realize your potential you must look beyond the end of yourself, realizing that where you end is most likely where you actually begin.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To present is to take a stand and being responsible.

~ Aayush Jain

I hated the flashcards and I hated the multiplication tables, but I did enjoy the fact that my dad took time out of his schedule to help me in the areas in which I needed it.

~ Sara Dormon

Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self.

~ Richard Rohr

We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.

~ Richard Rohr

Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person begins childhood with a mind that is essentially a blank slate – a tabula rasa – before receiving outside impressions. Early childhood experiences and perceptions begin the formulation of a state of conscious awareness, the infantile steps in forming a personality, developing social and emotional behavior, and acquiring practical and book knowledge. Childhood plays a critical role in forming our final version of a self-concept.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Perception of a self is not simply about actuality. Human beings’ identities are self-generating and people constantly revise and recreate the story of their being. Coming-into-being, not being, is the highest expression of reality. We only attain the fullest knowledge of a living thing including ourselves when we know what it was, understand what it now is, and understand what it can become. We do not know the truth of a living thing’s existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

~ Philip Zaleski

King was a transformed person. Evil was no longer a theory.

~ Troy Jackson

With endless pharmacological supplies at our fingertips, we do not need to penetrate the motives behind our actions, feelings, transgressions, dreams, and phobias. High on chemical substances we can remain stagnated in an infantile mental state. Without introspection, we foreclose ourselves from gaining the insight that allows us to navigate adulthood’s ceaseless demands.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

~ Pat Conroy

The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.

~ Poul Anderson

Nations as well as men require time to learn, whatever may be their intelligence or zeal.

~ Alexis De Tocqueville

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

~ John Howard Griffin

He's taking the change well? She asked.Except for getting a bit overtired. He's excited, but what 15-year-old wouldn't be under these circumstances?

~ Frank Herbert

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

~ H.w. Brands