Mature Reflection Quotes

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.

When you're younger, think less and do more; when you're older, do less and think more.

You are more thoughtful because you don't act as quickly anymore. When I turned 70 it was the first time I felt young for my age. Fifty dropped on me like a ton of bricks - there is something about that number - but when 70 came along I felt good about it.

These are very serious times, and serious people need to be doing some serious thinking.

To think things out properly and fairly, a fellow's got to be calm and old and toothless: When you're an old gaffer with no teeth, it's easy to say: 'Damn it, boys, you mustn't bite!' But, when you've got all thirty-two teeth.

Today is a day for sober and mature reflection, not glee. Mindless celebration is both spiritually inappropriate and politically naive.

We too, through lack of knowledge and of sufficiently mature reflection, mistook the visible outward appearance of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself.

I've always been a curious thinker. And now, as an adult, I can articulate it.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Slowly but surely I have been soaking Rilke up these last few months: the man, his work and his life. And that is probably the only right way with literature, with study, with people or with anything else: to let it all soak in, to let it all mature slowly inside you until it has become a part of yourself. That, too, is a growing process. Everything is a growing process. And in between, emotions and sensations that strike you like lightning. But still the most important thing is the organic process of growing.

The blues is also existential and offers a sense of mature reflection that enabled it to be the leitmotif of modern life.

It's hard to say that my twenties were the most miserable time in my life or that my first wife drove me crazy or that I hated the job that I had. You can say all of those things. But for the most part, people manage to have a good time when they're that age.