Maturity proverbs

Page 4

◆ The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?

- Gordon B. Hinckley99

◆ Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

- Douglas Adams99

◆ You are never too old to become younger!

- Mae West99

◆ I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

- Maya Angelou99

◆ 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 Dostoyevsky99

◆ I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn't much improved my opinion of them.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry99

◆ When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

- C.S. Lewis99

◆ Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.

- Mark Z. Danielewski99

◆ There are some questions that shouldn't be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers.

- Anne Bishop99

◆ I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.

- Janet Fitch99

◆ The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.

- John C. Maxwell99

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

- M.J. Croan99

◆ Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

- T.S. Eliot99

◆ Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

- Stephen King99

◆ The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

- Peter De Vries99