maturity

...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.

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

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

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

Some tragic mistakes are often made by those who acquire the reins of control before their maturity is adequate to handle it.

A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistake is the rapid learner.

Realize that maturity does not come with age but with acceptance of responsibility.

But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.

Your maturity is based upon your responsibility.

Maturity is the ability to make a decision and stand by it.

A woman stood in front of her with the peculiar poise that comes before the discovery of age and after the loss of innocence.

When we concentrate on preaching what people WANT to hear we will only succeed in exciting their flash and depressing their spirit.

Supreme level of maturity is needed to realize; that, conveyance of family life, depends on equally maintained pair of wheels and both crediting each other, for their functioning and struggles as well.

I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact, there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which__hough, I trust, an honest one__s of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.An effect__hich I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position__s, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer__ortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world__ay return to himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity,__hat his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,__e for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope__ hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death__s, that, finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than any thing else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his Uncle's pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold__eaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman__as, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character.

Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed _ because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.

Is it possible that we never feel grown-up because, as our capabilities increased with age, so increased our responsibilities?

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

The Jesus Movement had survived the fad phase and was settling down for the long haul.