Maturation Quotes

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

~ David Brooks

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

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

~ Richard Rohr

When you enter heaven you shall find Him there bearing the dew of His youth; and through eternity the Lord Jesus shall still remain the perennial spring of joy, and life, and glory to His people.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

~ Donald Miller

Universities, he (William Dershowitz) says, have been absorbed into the commercial ethos. Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement. Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

~ David Brooks

The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact of the culture with which we surround ourselves and how easily we can be defined and constrained by our jobs.

~ A.j. Jacobs

The writer as boxer says he develops by, learning from everyone who'll spar with me.

~ Davis Miller

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.

~ C.s. Lewis

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

The author's differing experience of school geography as a faculty member going from parking lot to parking lot and to locations centered around HER office and her experience of the more scattered life of a student speaks to a larger truth. As adults, we are used to following the same routine and look romantically on anything different.

~ Rebekah Nathan

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams

~ Paul C. Nagel

The military was providing him (George H.W. Bush) with an education that was not available at Andover or Yale.

~ George W. Bush

I did not come into this Army to serve one man, to serve a friend.

~ Jeff Shaara

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

~ Walter Isaacson

As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.

~ Frank Herbert

I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface.

~ Joe Cawley

Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.

~ Joseph J. Ellis

His childhood passed in quiet anxiety.

~ Jen Pollock Michel

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.

~ Sherry Turkle

Make me the father, O Lord, who will show my sons enough of a sense of humor, so that they will always be serious, but never take themselves too seriously. Give them humility, so they will always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

~ Thom S. Rainer

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast.

~ H.w. Brands

There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.

~ H.w. Brands

A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.

~ John Howard Griffin

I was too old for my father to (be protective), too young to be flattered.

~ Catherine Marshall

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him.

~ Pearl S. Buck

They are full of wonder and awe and can play creatively. Sometimes they can sense things that adults often take time to perceive or know. For example, young children are able to make quick intuitive decisions about whom they will be friendly with. However, when this aspect of a child is not affirmed and noticed, it becomes hidden and repressed. As a result, young children can lose touch with a part of themselves that is already quite well developed.

~ Lisa Lantieri

if you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values.

~ Dennis Prager

Campuses are bubbles, artificial environments that insulate students from the life of the competitive marketplace. The more exact truth is that our campuses offer students the privileges of liberty without the corresponding responsibilities.

~ Peter Augustine Lawler

The faces of your young people in general are not interesting—I don't mean the children, but the young men and women—and they are awkward and clownish in their manners, without the quaintness of the elder generation, who are the funniest old dears in the world. They will all be quaint enough as they get older. You must remember the sort of life they lead. They get their notions very slowly, and they must have notions in their heads before they can show them on their faces.

~ Thomas Hughes

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

~ Sherry Turkle