Human Maturity Quotes

When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as before, but has to understand that although he has out-grown what before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in the growth and development of humanity.

I blame Rousseau, myself. "Man is born free", indeed. Man is not born free, he is born attached to his mother by a cord and is not capable of looking after himself for at least seven years (seventy in some cases).

It will be great to live in a world where we don't discuss sex anymore because we have managed to go beyond it. And then we can focus on more important things.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France,Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.

There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.

Children are not children. They are just younger people.

Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

I believe in humanity. We are an incredible species. We're still just a child creature, we're still being nasty to each other. And all children go through those phases. We're growing up, we're moving into adolescence now. When we grow up - man, we're going to be something!

The fact that civilization is becoming more intricate must not mean that we treat men for a longer period as immature. Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite: that we must skillfully make them mature sooner, that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture?

As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.

Ego is an immature stage of development for humans, and that's what it will be recognized as when the consciousness changes on the planet. Children will develop an ego and quickly outgrow it. That's very different from developing an ego and being stuck with it for the rest of your life.

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.

I think what matures us is time, not necessarily our physical bodies. So I think she can probably change as much as human would in the timespan of the show. However, I do think as a human you reach a point where there's a certain amount of humility and acceptance of life and its consequences when you see your own body change and age, and the pounds come or the wrinkles come.

Most men are not that evolved.

All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If any human being is to reach full maturity both the masculine and feminine sides of the personality must be brought up into consciousness.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

It is the individual man in his individual freedom who can mature with his warm spirit the unripe world.

Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.

In humans, the thing is that as we mature, our telomeres slowly wear down. So the question has always been: 'Did that matter?' Well, more and more, it seems like it matters.

Uncontrolled technology can certainly bring down disaster, perhaps irreparable, on our race. The only protection against it is a growth in man's spiritual and moral maturity proportionate to his growth in technical skill and power.

All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.