Quotes & Sayings About Maturity And Growing Up

If you can't find any fun during childhood, you naturally won't look for it as you grow up to maturity. You will grow 'hard,' and look upon fun as foolish. Also, if you don't furnish fun for a child, don't look for it to grow up bright, happy and loving. So, always put in a child's path an opportunity to watch, talk about, and know, as many good things as you can. — Ernest Vincent Wright

You don't always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me ...
Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be a certain way when we're adults and if they're not that way, we should make them be; or at least pretend. But after a certain point that just doesn't work. — Chris Crutcher

A woman of mystery is one who also has a certain maturity and whose actions speak louder than words. Any woman can be one, if she keeps those two points in mind. She should grow up-and shut up. — Alfred Hitchcock

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up ... These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with. — Mark Twain

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child ... that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. — Jean Vanier

But I can't manage to grow up and change shape. I'm 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're all tiny. — Delphine De Vigan

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.
But there again, when he sipped at the whiskey his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bullocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies. — Stephen Fry

The boy was growing bored and this was a form of growing up. — Miranda July

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. — Maya Angelou

Maybe that's what growing up was really all about. Adults always say how complicated life gets as we age, but really, I think we just look for bigger challenges to overcome. Our biggest fears stretch from sleeping without our beloved teddy bear to finding out that we have no purpose in life. Did time, maturity, and overcoming obstacles offer the kind of contentment so evident in Orvin? Or did we just simply give up and surrender to the life we were already living? — Renee Carlino

That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them. — J.X. Burros

Within the church, it is possible for believers to possess a profound unity based on a shared commitment to Biblical truth, an intimate knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, and a deep level of spiritual maturity. Paul also adds "sound doctrine" and "growing in Christlikeness" as additional benefits that result from the saints being properly equipped to build up the body of Christ."(Comments on Ephesians 4 vs 11-13) — John F. MacArthur Jr.

We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given. — Midge Decter

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. — Maya Angelou

What's so beautiful about girls?" I would implore.
And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn't possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; "You'll understand someday, James. — Jake Vander Ark

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera. — Sol Luckman

When young we have a vivid sense of basic values like trust and warm-heartedness, which we tend to neglect in today's competitive world as we grow up, yet from birth we all have a need for affection. The emotions we experience today have not changed much over the last few thousand years, but the interest increasing numbers of people are showing in their inner world and how their emotions work is a sign of maturity. — Dalai Lama

Man needs to do some growing up. This need is manifested, among other ways, by the emotional unreason he tends to show toward the behavior of wild creatures. The immoderations and inconsistencies in his attitude toward wolves or other predatory or competing species are particularly revealing a lack of maturity. — Paul L. Errington

Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it. — M.J. Croan

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help. — Eugene H. Peterson

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal. — Ryu Murakami

It is us who change. We grow stronger, and the problems appear less imposing. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

When we cling, often forever, to our old patterns of thinking and behaving, we fall to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity. — M. Scott Peck

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent. — Hugo Hamilton

Today you are encouraged to accept your failures. When you are willing to fail miserably, you are able to achieve greatly. Admitting your mistakes and weaknesses doesn't diminish your strength, it shows your courage and maturity. Sometimes you just need to be quiet, swallow your pride and accept you were wrong. It's not about giving up, it's about growing up. — John Geiger

What I've found about it is that there are some folks you can talk to until you're blue in the face
they're never going to get it and they're never going to change. But every once in a while, you'll run into someone who is eager to listen, eager to learn, and willing to try new things. Those are the people we need to reach. We have a responsibility as parents, older people, teachers, people in the neighborhood to recognize that. — Tyler Perry

We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it. — Irene Tomkinson

The evangelical wing of the Church spends a lot of energy on being "born again" but little time on "growing up" again. There is a failing to encourage newborn believers out of the maternity ward and into a big world where they will spend the rest of their spiritual lives trying to find what they are looking for. — Steve Stockman

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. — Whipplesnaith

Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?
- What weight?
- The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?
- We are not vessels; we are missiles.
- We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.
- We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful. — Dave Eggers

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science. — Richard Dawkins

No one grows up. That's one of the sickest lies they ever tell you. People change. People compromise. People get stranded in situations they don't want to be in ... and they make the best of it. But don't try to tell me it's some kind of ... glorious preordained ascent into emotional maturity. It's not. — Greg Egan

For the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it's so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble ... grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it's the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters. — Greg Rucka

The American civil space program is growing to maturity. It has passed through the joys and crises of precocious childhood and now is being called upon to do grown-up things, like earn a living and establish permanent roots in space. — John Noble Wilford

He was still so very young. Faeries - true faeries, not their changeling throwaways - live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it's over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He'd never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.
But he didn't. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him. — Seanan McGuire

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 Dostoyevsky

Fathers were supposed to be invulnerable - but that attitude was childish, he now saw. Irritatingly, he might have to change his outlook. He could no longer be merely indignant and resentful. He was not the only sufferer. Dad had hurt him, but he had hurt Dad as well, and they were both responsible. Feeling responsible was not as comfortable as feeling outraged. — Ken Follett

Some days, Kaylin fervently wished that she had already passed Adult 101 and could get on with being the person she wanted to be. — Michelle Sagara

She tried so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all. — George R R Martin

Being a child sucked. Being a teenager was worse. And being an adult seemed so far away that I had a better chance at swimming the length of the ocean than growing up. — Shannon A. Thompson

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 Angelou

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

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions - and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas - can't be yours alone. [ ... ] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares. — Doris Lessing

Oh maturity's a wrapped up package deal so it seems
And ditching teenage fantasy means ditching all your dreams
All your friends and peers and family solemnly tell you you will
Have to grow up be an adult yeah be bored and unfulfilled
Oh when no ones yet explained to me exactly what's so great
About slaving 50 years away on something that you hate, about meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity
Well if that's your road then take it but it's not the road for me. — Frank Turner

If you happen to be white in a white country; pretty according to the dictates of fashion; rich in a country where money is adored, it's almost impossible to grow up and to grow up honest inside. It is almost impossible. Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging. But to grow up, to take responsibility for the time you take up, and the space you occupy, to honor every living person for his or her humanity, that is to grow up. — Maya Angelou