Maturity Quotes - Page 9

He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.

It is us who change. We grow stronger, and the problems appear less imposing.

It is not the time that a person has lived that determines maturity, but what he does during that time.

At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.

Maturity is the moment one regains one's innocence.

Individual free choices” can only be the expression of an “individual free will”.The notion of an “individual free will” generating “individual free choices” creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability.Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise.The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique “soul”) with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our “individual free choices”, from cradle to grave. It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors.The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a “non-chosen” choice eludes me.The notion of individual free will can at best be a “gut felt” illusion, but can never have logical relevance.What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a “gut felt” illusion?-Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual.Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity.How’s your “gut” now?

Compassion makes you strong, caring and creative. It creates a different attitude, a level of maturity and understanding, where you do something which makes you stand out of crowd.

...Teachings are given to different men under different circumstances and in different times... [but] ...the Lord is the same yesterday, today and forever. If a parent commands a little child not to play with matches, and then commands a teenager to light the campfire, is this a contradiction? It's only a question of preparedness - one is ready and one is not.

The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.

In other words, the proof of spiritual maturity is not how 'pure' you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.