True Adulthood Quotes

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever's view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: "One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities." Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the "power of facing unpleasant facts." True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we're lucky) to make the most of on this earth.

There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage. ~ Jeffrey Tayler

I've always thought that one of the signs of true adulthood is when you realize that you spend each Christmas trying to relive childhood memories that never really happened in the first place. ~ Josh Kilmer-Purcell

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human maturity. No true adult wants to be a consumer, worker bee, or tycoon, or a soldier in an imperial war, and none would go through these motions if there were other options at hand. The enlivened soul and wild nature are deadly to industrial growth economies - and vice versa. ~ Bill Plotkin

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways. ~ Lynn Coady

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it. Whether contact with the parents can then in fact be maintained will depend on the given circumstances in each individual case. What is absolutely imperative is the termination of the harmful attachment to the internalized parents of childhood, an attachment that, though we call it love, certainly does not deserve the name. It is made up of different ingredients, such as gratitude, compassion, expectations, denial, illusions, obedience, fear, and the anticipation of punishment. Time ~ Alice Miller

This is the spirit of the Order, indeed the true spirit of Mercy flowing on us. ~ Catherine McAuley

Transitioning to adulthood is hard enough. Having your friends judge your progress doesn't make it any easier. ~ Ryan O'Connell

The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals. ~ Emma Goldman

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

True character stands the test of emergencies. Do not be mistaken, it is weakness from which the awakening is rude. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

I believe anything that anyone tells me. I have found that that is the best way to go through life. When I was younger, I used to be more skeptical, but then I found out that most things were true. So I believe tabloids. I believe legends. I believe anything anyone tells me. ~ Justin Kirk

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles. ~ Sherwood Anderson

The more familiar something becomes the more true we think it to be. Advertisers, teachers and even cult leaders will repeat their messages over and over to illicit this effect. If we hear a lie often enough, we'll start to believe it. ~ Thomas Baker

The best way to find out what you really want is to find out what gives you true happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering. ~ Melanie Klein

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. ~ Socrates

My intent, here, is to tell our story in a dramatically truthful way. While the facts may be less than accurate, please understand that the emotion is true. The intent is true. And, dramatically speaking, intention is everything. ~ Garth Stein

It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things. ~ David Wroblewski

Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else. ~ Seth Dickinson

If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life. ~ E.F. Schumacher

A knot grew in his chest. All signs of weakness, nerves, stress. He looked around him at the true examples of men - at least it seemed that way. Six years ago he had graduated from New York University, around the middle of his class in film school. He quickly learned that the middle meant "unemployable. ~ Derek Blass

Only one statement about life is universally true: It's going to end badly. ~ Evans Light

8th Commandment:

"Thou shalt make thy program's purpose and structure clear to thy fellow man by using the One True Brace Style, even if thou likest it not, for thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to understanding. ~ Henry Spencer

[In many circumstances,] the most important thing about a proposition is not that it be true, but that it be interesting. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they're true. As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing more than a thought. ~ Adyashanti

Our religious institutions have far too often become handmaidens of the status quo, while the genuine religious experience is anything but that. True religion is by nature disruptive of
what has been, giving birth to the eternally new. ~ Marianne Williamson

That philosopher who orders us to conceal ourselves and to care for no one but ourselves and who wishes us to remain unknown to others, wants us even less to be held in honour and glory by them. He also advised Idomeneus in no wise to govern his actions by reputation or by common opinion, except to avoid such incidental disadvantages as the contempt of men might bring him.10 Those words are infinitely true, in my opinion, and are reasonable. ~ Michel De Montaigne

It's funny. That feeling of home. It's so temporary, like bathwater: the warmth eventually grows cold. ~ K.M. Alexander

There is an absolute power that truly empowers without corrupting ~ Constance Friday

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable. ~ Joseph Addison

In an age which has embraced every novelty, the true rebel is the traditionalist. ~ Kevin Clark

..one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture form, and where it all begins. ~ Andrea Barrett

Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense.
Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature. . . . Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. . . . The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . . . and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night. ~ Victor Hugo

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once. ~ Tim Blake Nelson

Only within our body, with its heart and mind, can bondage and suffering be found, and only here can we find true liberation. ~ Gautama Buddha

As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they inevitably face an increasingly nagging question: Is this all there is? Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing; most people, expect that in adulthood things will get better. During the early years of adulthood the future still looks promising. But inevitably the mirror' shows the first white hairs and confirms the fact that those few extra pounds are not about to leave; eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body...' Where's all that money I was to have made? Where are all of the good times I was going to have? ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

For herself, she declared that she paid no attention to her birthdays - didn't give a hoot about them; and it is true that when you have amassed several dozen of the same sort of thing, it loses that rarity which is the excitement of collectors. ~ Dorothy Parker

But one good thing with your brain being sick is that you're going to be really good at keeping secrets. That's a good thing if you're a grandpa." Grandpa nods. "That's true, that's true . . . what was that? ~ Fredrik Backman

The secularizing 'values' and events that have been predicted would happen in the Muslim world have now begun to unfold with increasing momentum and persistence due still to the Muslims' lack of understanding of the true nature and implications of secularization as a philosophical program. ~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas