#maturity

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

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've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams. ↗

— Dara Torres

#ambition #dreams #experience #goals #identity

The narrator analyzes that the maturing, passing away boy within him, "had issued me a challenge as he passed the baton to the man in me: He had challenged me to have the courage to become a gentle, harmless man. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#manhood #maturity #courage

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

With girls, friendships are hard because you have to learn to get to a maturity level to love them but not want to be them. ↗

— Nikki Reed

#friendships #get #hard #learn #level

As a fortysomething actor, you reach a plateau of maturity from which you can really get stuck in. ↗

— Julian Sands

#get #maturity #plateau #reach #really

The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#growth #maturity #change

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#death #maturity #wisdom #death

There, too, she would sit for hours gazing seawards. No tiniest speck of sail that crossed the waters could escape her watchful eyes, and as she watched she dreamed that some day one of these distant sails should bear down towards her, and one should come, in whose hand she would lay her own, and they two would flee to the far East. But as the changeless years went by and brought him not, the girl grew sullen, and a sense of wrong possessed her, for the older she grew, the clearer became her consciousness of a world beyond her, and the greater her longing to seek it. ("The Serpent's Head") ↗

— Emilia Francis Strong Dilke

#maturity #romance #dreams