Maturity Quotes

To be of good quality, you have to excuse yourself from the presence of shallow and callow minded individuals.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

~ Bob Seger

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 in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

~ M.j. Croan

In a desperate attempt to stay young forever we have achieved eternal childishness, rather than eternal youth.

~ Daniel Prokop

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

~ Ernest Hemingway

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.

~ J.x. Burros

...when it comes to defining adulthood, nothing has made me feel more grown-up than knowing that one of the two people in the world who loved me the most, without condition, was no longer in the world.

~ Jean Hannah Edelstein

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done.

~ Naomi Alderman

I think I may have to grow up without growing old. I think we're going to have to define differently what I'm going to be. We're going to have to define my growing up differently.

~ Mattie Stepanek

... I guessed that when you are nearly a man, you have to learn to put up with a lot of aggravation from little old bitty kids.

~ Fred Gipson

I don't know why I didn't have this sixth sense or whatever it is all along, but part of me thinks maybe it means I'm growing up, evolving into a real superhero. Like maybe the world knew I couldn't handle it before, but now, now I'm finally becoming me an the world know sit -- or maybe I'm just learning to listen to myself.

~ Kelly Thompson

Fathers were supposed to be invulnerable - but that attitude was childish, he now saw. Irritatingly, he might have to change his outlook. He could no longer be merely indignant and resentful. He was not the only sufferer. Dad had hurt him, but he had hurt Dad as well, and they were both responsible. Feeling responsible was not as comfortable as feeling outraged.

~ Ken Follett

Sometimes or most of the time, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.

~ B.c. Yaras

Sometimes or most of the times, we need to remind ourselves that we're not a KID anymore.

~ Bernie Yaras

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

~ Stephen Fry

Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be.

~ Michelle Sagara

Maturing is realizing how many things don’t require your comment.

~ Rachel Wolchin

I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.

~ Hiromi Kawakami

It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it’s almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don’t grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up.

~ Maya Angelou

But I can’t manage to grow up and change shape. I’m still tiny, and staying that way, perhaps because I know the secret that everyone pretends to be unaware of, perhaps because I know that deep down we’re all tiny.

~ Delphine De Vigan

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.

~ Dave Eggers

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

~ Amanda Hocking

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.

~ Whipplesnaith

A person's readiness to date is largely a matter of maturity and environment.

~ Myles Munroe

All mothers breed dead children.

~ Mie Hansson

... It is immensely moving when a mature man - no matter whether old or young in years - is aware of a responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere reaches the point where he says: 'Here I stand; I can do no other'. That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man - a man who can have the 'calling for politics'.

~ Max Weber

Innocence is a splendid thing, only it has the misfortune not to keep very well and to be easily misled.

~ Immanuel Kant

each year, she finds her friendships less volatile and easier, because she increasingly succeeds at looking past their flaws and disappointments and homing in on their pleasures and on what set them in motion to begin with. And she wonders why she didn’t do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.

~ Frank Bruno

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

~ Donald Miller

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self.

~ David Brooks

Older people make this mistake all the time with younger people, treating them as a finished product when in fact they are in process.

~ Andre Agassi

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

~ John Parenti

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

~ Larry Eskridge

To be a man, a boy must see a man.

~ J.r. Moehringer

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

~ Rich Mullins

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

~ Richard Rohr

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 in my own life or other people’s.

~ Tullian Tchividjian

Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.

~ W.p. Kinsella