maturity

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

Forgiveness is a transformative act because it asks you to be a more empathetic and compassionate person, thereby making you better than the person you were when you were first hurt.

The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.

In a matter of weeks, he had learned that without suffering and doubt, there can be no whole human being.

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

A useful education served women best, More thought. To __earn how to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to a woman._ Yet, when beauty is all that is expected or desired in a woman, she is left with nothing in its absence. It __s a most severe trail for those women to be called to lay down beauty, who have nothing else to take up. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources,_ she argued.

Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.

I respect traditional people - they have the eyes which see value in the tarnished. This is a gift in itself. Tradition requires a wealth of discipline in order to be adhered to, hence it is rarely found in youth.

...The happy Warrior... is he... whose powers shed round him in the common strife, or mild concerns of ordinary life, a constant influence, a peculiar grace; but who, if he be called upon to face some awful moment to which Heaven has joined great issues, good or bad for human kind, is happy as a lover; and attired with sudden brightness, like a man inspired; and, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law in calmness made, and sees what he foresaw; or if an unexpected call succeed, come when it will, is equal to the need: he who, though thus endued as with a sense and faculty for storm and turbulence, is yet a soul whose master-bias leans to homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes; sweet images! which, wheresoe'er he be, are at his heart; and such fidelity it is his darling passion to approve; more brave for this, that he hath much to love:_

Compassion makes you strong, caring and creative. It creates a different attitude, a level of maturity and understanding, where you do something which makes you stand out of crowd.

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, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

Evolving is not arrogance. It is confidence that won't be pulled backwards, by those that feel left behind.

How do we perceive what__ important in life, from what we once thought to what we think now, how does it change?

There is this common notion that young conservatives are the few, that most people had liberal worldviews when they were young. If this is true, then it is with great irony that a number of old liberals must never had progressed into conservatives as they grew older.

Except. What is normal at any given time? We change just as the seasons change, and each spring brings new growth. So nothing is ever quite the same.

We are all daughters of God in various stages of construction.

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.