maturity

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

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.

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

(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.

Treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis.

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

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.

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__ do that sooner, why she gave in to so much fury and sorrow when she could have just let those emotions go.

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

Gray is not a substitute for black and white. You don__ bump into people without saying you__e sorry. When you shake hands, it__ supposed to mean something. If someone is in trouble, you reach out.

... 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'.

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

Information can be harmful when you're not ready for it. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']

All mothers breed dead children.

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

But I can__ manage to grow up and change shape. I__ 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__e all tiny.

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.

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.