Mature Understanding Quotes

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know.

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

Don't tell me you don't know what love is When you're old enough to know better.

As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most... Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

Youth has a quickness of apprehension, which it is very apt to mistake for an acuteness of penetration.

I realize that some people will not believe that a child of little more than ten years is capable of having such feelings. My story is not intended for them. I am telling it to those who have a better knowledge of man. The adult who has learned to translate a part of his feelings into thoughts notices the absence of these thoughts in a child, and therefore comes to believe that the child lacks these experiences, too. Yet rarely in my life have I felt and suffered as deeply as at that time.

I've seen the world and I've seen the bigger picture.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

I remember somebody handed me Siddhartha when I was I think 18, and I started to read it and I just really didn't like it, and I left it and it was just gathering dust for years. Then maybe five years later, the world shook as I read it.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.

And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.

Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.

I was 29 or 30 when I felt sure of what I was doing, but not fully identifying as a songwriter until I was 37.

The reason we might lose love is because we are always looking outside of us, thinking that the object or action of love is out there. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves.

Eyes of youth have sharp sight but commonly not so deep as those of elder age.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

In the course of her education she had gone through the history usually put into the hands of young people... now her ripened reason gave to her present study at least the advantage of novelty.