"maturity is only the control of one's imagination."
— Sidney Greenslate

"The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?"
— Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)

"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
— C.S. Lewis

"Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see."
— Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency)

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
— C.S. Lewis

"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 Dostoevsky (White Nights and Other Stories)

"It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"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 (Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel)

"Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?"
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"There are some questions that shouldn't be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers."
— Anne Bishop (Daughter of the Blood)

"Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."
— Peter De Vries

"Cultivate and nourish yourself to enact maturity and achieve stability. If you accord everywhere with thorough clarity and cut off sharp corners without dependence on doctrines, you can be called a complete person."
— Hongzhi Zhengiue

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowhip with other human beings as we take our place among them."
— Virginia Woolf

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension."
— Joshua Loth Liebman

"It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers."
— Warren Bennis

"Childhood and adulthood were not factors of age but states of mind."
— Alex Shakar (The Savage Girl)

"For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future."
— Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)

"Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties."
— Michael Crichton (The Lost World)

"She spoke with the usual cadences of the young: sentences curling upward at the end, all statements fading into a smoky, implied question mark, as though nothing could be said with any reasonable certainty."
— Laura Kalpakian (Educating Waverley)

"...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.
(Sandy, in THE CRAZY HORSE ELECTRIC GAME)"
— Chris Crutcher

"...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 (Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life)

"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 (Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life)

""I would prefer," Pat said, his voice a little stiff, as if he expected resistance, "that I be the cosigner on the loan, if you go through with this. I know I'm not a famous billionaire, but I think my credit's just as good."
"No, you're wrong about that," Tess said, shaking her head.
"What?"
"As far as I'm concerned, it's better. I'd much rather do business with you."
They shook on it. It was a deal, after all, not a time for hugging.
Favors, Arnie Vasso had once said. Your father knows all about favors. He had meant it as an insult, a sly reference to the corners the Monaghans and Weinsteins cut here and there. Now Tess saw it for the simple truth it was: Her father understood favors. How to do them, how to accept them, how to walk away when the price was too steep. It was a lesson she wouldn't mind learning someday.
Maybe this was the place to start."
— Laura Lippman

"Dont worry about the children, the unknowing are respectfull in spirit"
— Mala Spotted Eagle

"At thirty a man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves; and re-resolves; then dies the same."
— Edward Young (Night Thoughts: Or, the Complaint and the Consolation)

"You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so."
— Doris Lessing

"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

"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 (Green Mars)

"Maturity is key."
— Lauren Kent

"Maturity cannot be overated."
— Karen Bennett

"Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls."
— Muriel Barbery (Gourmet Rhapsody)

"Maturity Is The Acceptance Of Ones Madness"
— Nicole Stacey-O'Reilly