Maturation Quotes

Much like life, you don't complete a puzzle by throwing away the pieces. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The faster the motion, the less time to think. Fuselage journalism, Hugh Sidey of Time later called it. ~ David Halberstam

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us. ~ Jen Pollock Michel

After the original rapture of conversion had settled in, (Bob) Dylan backed away from his obviously Christian lyrics and returned to his more metaphorical use of language. ~ Ron Jacobs

when you're the first in your family to go to college, you never truly feel like they've let you go. ~ New York Times Staff

It was as though the very process of maturation with him had been reversed, so that with experience he seemed to grow more, not less, childish. ~ David Falkner

Everything worthwhile ends. We are in the perpetual process now: creation, maturation, cessation. ~ John Logan

He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

QUIRK THEORY: Many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting. ~ Alexandra Robbins

I can't beat you, I can't join you. ~ Harper Lee

Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If we're really to give ourselves the best of ourselves, we have to be honest with the worst of ourselves. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If boys would think, it would be well to give them less classwork and more opportunity for thought. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He found his voice in the silences, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it. ~ Geraldine Brooks

I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful. ~ Harold Bloom

Nothing that remains static is truly ever alive. Nature does not abide idleness. All energy sources of the natural world and the cosmos are in a constant motion, they are in a perpetual state of fluctuation. All forms of living must make allowances for the seasons of change. The Earth itself is twirling through space, spinning on its axis analogous to a child's top. The unpredictable forces of instability brought about by a combination of motion, change, and flux propels the miraculous dynamism of existence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian. ~ Philip Zaleski

It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species' maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. ~ Edward O. Wilson

Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts - 19th-century French literature - more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation. ~ David Brooks

When I push the button on my laptop, it should start up. If it doesn't, it can't blame its nonexistent emotions. It should respond immediately and appropriately because that's what it has been created to do.

In evaluating my parenting, I realized much of my anger with my children arose from my having the wrong perspective about them. I was viewing them as if they were machines. ~ Aaron Earls

Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Word of God bares weight on all ages always. ~ Matt Chandler

You never can tell about these mild-mannered boys. ~ James Carl Nelson

The letter is too belligerent. If I were you, I would state the facts as they were, without the pepper and salt. Abraham Lincoln ~ Harold Holzer

You are the gatekeeper of your child's mental diet. ~ Gary Chapman

It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Jefferson reflected, "I think of her (a college infatuation) perhaps too much for my peace of mind. " Nevertheless, he was robbed of his considerable verbal powers when he got the chance to speak to the object of his affections. ~ John Ferling

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I. ~ H.W. Brands

Maturation is the development from environmental support to self-support. ~ Bruce Lee

Sitting down with a great book means that when you stand up, you will be a completely different person from who you were when you sat down. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Christopher Nolan's astounding third Batman feature, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' represents the true maturation of the superhero movie - and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre. ~ John Podhoretz

I am always attracted to the moments when a person who is associated with a certain message, image or sensibility evolves. I am very interested in how audiences respond to that maturation and absorb the evolution. ~ Raf Simons

One of the benefits the authors point out of discussing logical consequences with children rather than handing out arbitrary punishments is that the practice gives THEM the language to discuss One of the benefits the authors point out of discussing logical consequences with children rather than handing out arbitrary punishments is that the practice gives THEM the language to discuss seting boundaries and making decisions, even in conflicts with their friends. ~ Adele Faber

The Atreides are known to start late getting there growth. ~ Frank Herbert

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense. ~ Philip Zaleski

Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for themselves, for their opinions, for their talents, for their perspectives. The life of a woman shrivels under the weight of an unnatural deference and lost development. Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. The spiritual life of a woman never knows total maturation in an environment that never seeks her opinions, her interpretations, her insights, and her experience of God. Whatever ministry she was born to perform never comes to light, is lost to the church, dies on the vines that were never cultivated. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Pain is the perfecting of our souls, for it cuts in order to create, it hurts in order to hone, and it knocks us down with great force so that our resolve to get up becomes unimaginably greater than the force that knocked us down. And although we have come to know it differently, such is the spirit of pain. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

Youth is not a curse, but a fleeting blessing. Youth enables us to cavort freely unconcerned with the larger issues in life. Aging and the accompanying responsibilities that come with added maturity is what augments, vexes, and then excises us. Maturation represents the accumulation of supplanting changes happening in a person over time including physical, mental, and social growth and development. Growing old gracefully entails submission to biological alterations and witnessing unsettling changes in cultural and societal conventions. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness. ~ Philip Zaleski

In being able to learn from his mistakes and grow, Eisenhower "was transformed from a mere person into a personage. ~ Lynne Olson

The most significant and alarming consequence of early maturation is an increased risk for breast cancer in adulthood. ~ Joel Fuhrman

I don't want to know anything. I am not curious! ~ Charles Dickens

You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. ~ Richard Rohr

Truth becomes the foundation for every other life task. ~ Sherrie Eldridge

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity. ~ Sherry Turkle

I had intended to visit the haunting ground of my school days. Subconsciously I wanted to be in a place where anxiety, responsibility and financial burden had yet to surface. ~ Joe Cawley

The very lack of explicit pressure was itself a compelling force, for it created a world in which the expectation of success was simply there, a fact of life as basic as breakfast. ~ H.W. Brands

My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams ~ Paul C. Nagel

He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism. ~ Robert Silverberg

Better to wait actively than passively. ~ Stephen L. Carter

JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting. ~ David Pietrusza

Development is a voluntary process. You need a positive decision to make the right steps, but it starts with introspection. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality. ~ Richard Rohr

The business of hip hop is probably the most tangible example of the genre's dramatic maturation. ~ Carlos Wallace

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life. ~ Donald Miller

The author defines professionalism as exemplified by his subjects in their mutual unwillingness to take expected opposition personally. They would not allow grudges to get in the way of more important business. ~ Chris Matthews

Almightiness and wisdom combined will make no failures. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally. ~ Jen Pollock Michel

I am not ready to become the next version of me that I must. ~ Lori Blevins

The world of time, of space and condition, pleasure and pain, birth, growth, maturation, decay and death, spinning, spinning, spinning this world, always spinning. ~ Frederick Lenz

Your children are going through life with their eyes closed, so YOU'RE the one who has to steer. ~ Jennifer Senior

The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. ~ David Whyte

There is a time lag between the activation of brain systems that excite our emotions and impulses and the maturation of brain systems that allow us to check these feelings and urgings - it's like driving a car with a sensitive gas pedal and bad brakes. ~ Laurence Steinberg

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. ~ George Eliot

Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I find that the older I get, the clearer I want things to be. I think this is a natural symptom of maturation - as we age, mysteries pile up, and they're usually not the fun ones: Just how long do I have? Why do some people get what they deserve, and others don't? Why are certain problems so easy to solve, while others are totally impossible? Will they ever, ever bring working jetpacks to the marketplace? ~ Chip Kidd

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind. ~ Will Durant

What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it? ~ Frank Herbert

I hated the flashcards and I hated the multiplication tables, but I did enjoy the fact that my dad took time out of his schedule to help me in the areas in which I needed it. ~ Sara Dormon

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door. ~ Charles Finch

If you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values. ~ Dennis Prager

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many. ~ Plato

An indispensable ingredient for spiritual maturation is the cultivation of fortitude: strength, forbearance, and patience. ~ B. Alan Wallace

This anxiety to keep his father from anger was wearisome to him. ~ Pearl S. Buck

The author jokes that the culture at his first job at Entertainment Weekly chased away the worthwhile aspects of his Brown education, but in so doing he makes a subtle point about the profound impact of the culture with which we surround ourselves and how easily we can be defined and constrained by our jobs. ~ A. J. Jacobs

There's always a possibility of richer maturation - of taking more and more responsibility for yourself and for your life ... And this is what I hope ... to make you understand how much you gain by taking re-sponsibility for every emotion, every movement you make, every thought you have ... We touch each other by honestly being what we are, not intentionally making contact. ~ Frederick Salomon Perls

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists. ~ George F. Will

Resilience is rooted in habits we can cultivate and change. ~ Andrew Zolli

The young John Quincy Adams begins it lifelong habit of keeping a journal with reluctance that he might one day have to read it. He hopes, though, that the flaws in his earlier entries will be balanced by the progress he is able to see. ~ Paul C. Nagel

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What happens when insatiability dominates a person's emotional functioning? The process of maturation is preempted by an obsession or an addiction, in this case for peer connection. Peer contact whets the appetite without nourishing. It titillates without satisfying. The end result of peer contact is usually an urgent desire for more. The more the child gets, the more he craves.

The mother of an eight-year-old girl mused, "I don't get it - the more time my daughter spends with her friends, the more demanding she becomes to get together with them. How much time does she really need for social interaction, anyway?" Likewise, the parents of a young adolescent complained that "as soon as our son comes home from camp, he gets on the phone right away to call the kids he's just been with. Yet it's the family he hasn't seen for two weeks."

The obsession with peer contact is always worse after exposure to peers, whether it is at school or in playtimes, sleepovers, class retreats, outings, or camps. If peer contact satiated, times of peer interaction would lead automatically to increased self-generated play, creative solitude, or individual reflection. Many parents confuse this insatiable behavior with a valid need for peer interaction.

Over and over I hear some variation of "but my child is absolutely obsessed with getting together with friends. It would be cruel to deprive him." Actually, it would be more cruel and irresponsible to indulge what s ~ Gabor Mate

The quality self-confidence is not bad in youth. We rather like to see it, for it indicates usually the possession or the motive power which makes a man aggressive and enterprising. He works more vigorously if he is sure that he is nearer right than other people, and has no misgivings as to his ability to accomplish his ends. The self distrustful, self-critical young man, who is always looking for direction from somebody else is pretty sure to be left behind in the race. ~ The New York Sun

We need to forgive the adolescent versions of ourselves, if only because we need the practice to forgive those who are maturing awkwardly in our lives. ~ Madam Secretary

If you can achieve puberty, you can achieve a past. ~ Robert Harling

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling. ~ Maureen Corrigan

Man has to pick up his functions as he goes along. ~ E. M. Forster

Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization. ~ Jeff Jarvis

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment. ~ Philip Zaleski

For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It ~ M. Scott Peck

Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas. ~ David Pietrusza

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash. ~ David Foster Wallace

Make me the father, O Lord, who will show my sons enough of a sense of humor, so that they will always be serious, but never take themselves too seriously. Give them humility, so they will always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. ~ Thom S. Rainer

The military was providing him (George H.W. Bush) with an education that was not available at Andover or Yale. ~ George W. Bush

All of the fucking in "The Art of Joy" could put it in a class with "Story of O" or "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." But Sapienza's novel is about sex only insofar as an account of a woman's artistic, intellectual, and political maturation must include her sexual career. Or, better, the discovery of pleasure initiates Modesta's appetite more generally - for knowledge, for experience, for autonomy. It turns her outward, toward nonsexual things, by inwardly sustaining her. Her childish sadism is less sexual than it is basically libidinal: her erotic interest in her sister's or St. Agatha's pain, or the way in which her hatred of Leonora transmutes into arousal - these are signs of an exultant urge to live. "The real way of living is to answer to one's wants," D. H. Lawrence says in a letter (written, incidentally, from Italy). "I want that liberty, I want that woman, I want that pound of peaches, I want to go to sleep, I want to go to the pub and have a good time, I want to look abeastly swell today, I want to kiss that girl, I want to insult that man. ~ Disobedience Is A Virtue On Goliarda Sapienza S The Art Of Joy The New Yorker

We spend much of the first half of our lives trying to build internal models that fit the world and much of the last half of our lives trying to adjust the world so it fits the inner models. ~ Bruce Wexler

Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient.

Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority.

A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent ~ Gabor Mate

King was a transformed person. Evil was no longer a theory. ~ Troy Jackson