#maturity

Maturity A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose, I shall have, till my single body grows         Inaccurate, tired; Then I shall start to feel the backward pull Take over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, desired. And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink, As if at pain; for it is pain, to think         This pantomime Of compensating act and counter-act, Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,         My ablest time. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#maturity #stasis #life

Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind. ↗

— Alex Shakar

#maturity #age

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage. ↗

— Kim Stanley Robinson

#vitality #wisdom #youth #age

We both have a lot of growing-up to do... A lot of the world to see & figure out on our own." -- Leo ↗

— Emily Giffin

#maturity #realization #inspirational

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life. ↗

— Honoré de Balzac

#psychology #youth #change

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#i #live #maturity #painful #solitude

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. ↗

— Heather O'Neill

#growing-up #maturity #age

Whatever can be threatened, whatever can be shaken, whatever you fear cannot stand, is destined to crash. Do not go down with the ship. Let that which is destined to become the past slip away. Believe that the real you is that which beckons from the future. If it is a sadder you, it will be a wiser one. And dawn will follow the darkness sooner or later. Rebirth can never come without death. ↗

— Robert M. Price

#maturity #rebirth #wisdom #death

I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win. ↗

— Dara Torres

#experience #maturity #perspective #age

How they are all about, these gentlemen In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced, Like night around their order's star and gem And growing ever darker, stony-faced, And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped, Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles: How they surround each one of these who stopped To read and contemplate the objects d'art, Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours. Whit exquisite decorum they allow us A life of whose dimensions we seem sure And which they cannot grasp. They were alive To bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature, That is to be of darkness and to strive. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#introspection #maturity #poetry #rainer-maria-rilke #rilke