46 Maturity Quotes

In life's journey, maturity is a significant milestone that shapes our perspectives, decisions, and interactions. It’s a trait marked by wisdom, patience, and understanding, often achieved through life’s varied experiences. To celebrate this quintessential human quality, we've assembled a curated collection of the top 46 quotes on maturity. These quotes, from thinkers, writers, and leaders, offer profound insights and reflections on growing older and wiser. Whether you're seeking inspiration or simply a moment of contemplation, let these words serve as a guide to a more mature and fulfilling existence.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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.” - Anais Nin

4. “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

5. “It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn't deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He'd told Guitar that he didn't "deserve" his family's dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn't even "deserve" to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he "deserve" Hagar's vengeance. But why shouldn't his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely Hagar, who knew him and whom he'd thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone––she had a right to try to kill him too.Apparently he though he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.” - Toni Morrison

6. “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

7. “That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.” - Philip Pullman

8. “Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.” - Michael Crichton

9. “There are some questions that shouldn't be asked until a person is mature enough to appreciate the answers.” - Anne Bishop

10. “The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.” - John C. Maxwell

11. “There was that word again.Mature. Was this what maturity was? Giving up on the things we wanted because we knew we’d never get them?” - Diana Peterfreund

12. “One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” - Virginia Woolf

13. “A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.” - Mary Renault

14. “...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.” - Chris Crutcher

15. “Milk for infant as liquor for adult.” - Toba Beta

16. “Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.” - Mark Z. Danielewski

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

18. “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

19. “Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.” - Muriel Barbery

20. “The Girl was gone, buried in the past. She never wanted to hear that name again. She was a woman for better for worse. Whatever the future might bring she could face it as a woman, Ned Ridley's woman.” - Catherine Cookson

21. “The promise of a dreamer’s future will always remain greater than their present ability. God will always give them dreams that are further along than their current level of maturity.” - Wayne Cordeiro

22. “But I knew it was pure masturbation, because down in my gut I wanted nothing more than a clean bed and a bright room and something solid to call my own at least until I got tired of it. There was an awful suspicion in my mind that I'd finally gone over the hump, and the worst thing about it was that I didn't feel tragic at all, but only weary, and sort of comfortably detatched.” - Hunter S. Thompson

23. “The same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.” - Joel Salatin

24. “When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.” - John Gardner

25. “With age comes acumen. With experience comes insight.” - Chris Bohjalian

26. “Grow up, Bailey.""That is precisely what I'm doing," Bailey says. "I don't care if you don't understand that. Staying here won't make me happy. It will make you happy because you're insipid and boring, and an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It's not enough for me. It will never be enough for me. So I'm leaving. Do me a favor and marry someone who will take decent care of the sheep.” - Erin Morgenstern

27. “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” - W.B. Yeats

28. “It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.” - George Vaillant

29. “You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.” - Ted Hughes

30. “Most of us don't mind doing what we ought to do when it doesn't interfere with what we want to do, but it takes discipline and maturity to do what we ought to do whether we want to or not.” - Joseph B. Wirthlin

31. “the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.” - Edgar Lee Masters

32. “We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.” - Irene Tomkinson

33. “They stared at her curiously, and she caught snatches of conversation in two or three languages. It wasn't hard to guess their content, and she smiled a bit primly. Youth, it appeared, was full of illusions as to how much sexual energy two people might have to spare while hiking forty or so kilometers a day, concussed, stunned, diseased, on poor food and little sleep, alternating caring for a wounded man with avoiding becoming dinner for every carnivore within range - and with a coup to plan for the end.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

34. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” - Anonymous

35. “Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.” - Angela Carter

36. “There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.” - Whipplesnaith

37. “In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.” - John Williams

38. “Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.” - Richard Dawkins

39. “A person's readiness to date is largely a matter of maturity and environment.” - Myles Munroe

40. “Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.” - Bob Seger

41. “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.” - Paul Murray

42. “When we embrace the opposites within ourselves and understand that inner harmony arises when they mature, we find the love, joy, silence and freedom that are hidden in every moment. It is my experience that it is through the inner female side that we find the depth within ourselves – independent of if we are a man or a woman. It is through the female side that we find the inner source of love and truth. It is through the female side that we lit the light of our own consciousness. The more we learn to know the inner man and woman and the more we accept their different visions of life, the more a meeting happens between them that makes us happy and satisfied. Through embracing both these sides in ourselves, we realize that we really lack nothing – but that we already are love. When both the male and female side is capable of living in trust, a love begins to flow between them – a love that was always possible, but not realized. The inner woman is the meditative quality within ourselves. The inner woman is the source of love and truth. The inner woman is the capacity to surrender to life. It is through the inner woman that we are in contact with life. It is the inner woman that is the door to belongingness with the Whole.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

43. “We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very immature in heart. He who grows in grace remembers that he is but dust, and he therefore does not expect his fellow Christians to be anything more; he overlooks ten thousand of their faults, because he knows his God overlooks twenty thousand in his own case. He does not expect perfection in the creature, and, therefore, he is not disappointed when he does not find it. ... I know we who are young beginners in grace think ourselves qualified to reform the whole Christian church. We drag her before us, and condemn her straightway; but when our virtues become more mature, I trust we shall not be more tolerant of evil, but we shall be more tolerant of infirmity, more hopeful for the people of God, and certainly less arrogant in our criticisms.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

44. “On the other hand, when you grow up you will discover that some of the people in this world never passed beyond the stage of the cave-man.” - Hendrik Willem Van Loon

45. “Age brings maturity, experience ripens it.” - Vimal Athithan

46. “Many things become clearer with the perspective of maturity gained.” - Jacqueline Patricks