maturity

It didn't matter what anyone else saw in me. For the first time, I felt like I was seeing myself.

Chong said, "Do yourself a favor, Morg. Next time you're staring at a girl's boobs, look up. You'll be shocked to learn it, but there's going to be a face up there. Nose, mouth, eyes. And behind the eyes is an actual pe

Affectation is really a question of heart motive. Growing into a persona is an essential part of maturing. Anything you might choose to do is going to contribute to one persona or another. People will only call attention to it if it is markedly different from the course you were apparently on before.

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__ ceaseless demands.

Confidence comes with maturity, being more accepting of yourself.

The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE _ IS _ HARD.

People who have been initiated "broke through in what felt like breaking down".

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

The goal of a life purpose is not what you will create, but what it will make you into for creating it.

That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.

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__ existence until we discern its entire history from development to demise.

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.

Age 50 is the mile marker where any mildly perceptive person becomes acutely aware that he or she alone is accountable for the content and coherence of their character.

The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen.

Age doesn't determine maturity. It's the depth of life that does, not its duration.

Cadets can neither be treated as schoolboys or soldiers.