80 Inspiring Quotes On Maturity

In the ever-evolving journey of life, we encounter myriad experiences that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Maturity isn't merely an age; it's a collection of insights, emotions, and lessons learned over time. It signifies self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the wisdom to distinguish between what's momentary and what truly matters. Embracing maturity doesn't mean losing the wonder of youth but rather enriching it with depth and perspective. In this post, we bring you a thoughtfully curated collection of 80 inspiring quotes on maturity. These words of wisdom serve as guides, motivating us to grow, reflect, and navigate life with grace and understanding. Whether you're seeking clarity, encouragement, or a bit of reflection, these quotes are here to inspire and elevate your journey towards a more mature and fulfilled self.

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. “I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naive and romantic and idealistic - the part of you that you treasure most - to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact?” - Kenneth Cain

3. “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

4. “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.” - Peter De Vries

5. “Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?” - Stephen King

6. “People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.” - Heather O'Neill

7. “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

8. “It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.” - Arthur C. Clarke

9. “That was when it was all made painfully clear to me. When you are a child, there is joy. There is laughter. And most of all, there is trust. Trust in your fellows. When you are an adult...then comes suspicion, hatred, and fear. If children ran the world, it would be a place of eternal bliss and cheer. Adults run the world; and there is war, and enmity, and destruction unending. Adults who take charge of things muck them up, and then produce a new generation of children and say, "The children are the hope of the future." And they are right. Children are the hope of the future. But adults are the damnation of the present, and children become adults as surely as adults become worm food. Adults are the death of hope.” - Peter David

10. “Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

11. “The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

12. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” - T.S. Eliot

13. “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

14. “I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.” - Janet Fitch

15. “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

16. “For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future.” - Erich Maria Remarque

17. “Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.” - Joshua Loth Liebman

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

19. “To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.” - Edward Weeks

20. “Maturity is when your world opens up and you realize that you are not the center of it.” - M.J. Croan

21. “Memory changes as a person matures.” - Siri Hustvedt

22. “I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.” - John Steinbeck

23. “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

24. “The only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.” - COLSON WHITEHEAD

25. “I'd proven to the world that maturity, experience, dedication, and ingenuity can make up for a little senescence. Muscle tightening is not the only thing that happens to our bodies over time. We gain knowledge, focus, and understanding, and those things can help us win.” - Dara Torres

26. “I've wanted to win at everything, every day, since I was a kid. And time doesn't change a person, it just helps you get a handle on who you are. Even at age 41, I still hate losing--I'm just more gracious about it. I'm also aware that setbacks have an upside; they fuel new dreams.” - Dara Torres

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

28. “We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.” - Charles Schaefer

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

30. “There's truths you have to grow into.” - H.G. Wells

31. “Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither.Ripeness is all.” - William Shakespeare

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

33. “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

34. “We both have a lot of growing-up to do... A lot of the world to see & figure out on our own." -- Leo” - Emily Giffin (Love The One You're With)

35. “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

36. “To the immature, other people are not real.” - Harry and Bonaro Overstreet

37. “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

38. “A man should be able to hear, and to bear, the worst that could be said of him.” - Saul Bellow

39. “Lately, when I didn't have room to bitch, I didn't. Maturity, at last.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

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

41. “But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.” - James Baldwin

42. “There is a greater Christian faith than one which settles for the temporal happiness, and that is the augmentation of faith. The more faithful you become, the harder the obstacles get; but the harder the obstacles get, the tougher your spine grows; and the tougher your spine grows, the less dependent you are on man's approval. I came to know this about Christianity when valuing faith before comfort.” - Criss Jami

43. “The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people's perception of you rather than people's perception of you.” - Criss Jami

44. “I couldn't shake the impulse to help him. It seemed that the older I got the more I believed that everyone, homeless or not, deserved to be treated at least like a human.” - Julia Karr

45. “Grown men do not need leaders.” - Edward Abbey

46. “There are many forms of love as there is moments in time, and you are capable of feeling them all at different stages of your life.” - Shannon Alder

47. “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

48. “Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.” - Hermann Hesse

49. “It would mark the end of a year that he might look back on as hands, a pivot between two lines. Or not: maybe enough time, would pass that eventually he would look back on his life, all of it, as a series of events both logical and continuous.” - Nicole Krauss

50. “Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.” - Ernest Hemingway

51. “He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.” - Thomas Wolfe

52. “Is it possible that that's all maturity is? Speaking better? Is it possible that everybody in the world, is just a dumb, stupid kid acting like a grown-up because they can sound like one and look like one? It almost seems easy.” - Bob Flaherty

53. “A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows        Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, desired.And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,As if at pain; for it is pain, to think        This pantomimeOf compensating act and counter-act,Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,        My ablest time.- Maturity” - Philip Larkin

54. “That boy made me realize, for a while at least, that my parents were wrong, and I didn't have to be like them.” - J.X. Burros

55. “When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life, and it is only fair that one has to pay dearly for having assaulted men and things in this manner with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of tastes, the taste for the unconditional, should be cruelly fooled and abused until a man learns to put a little art into his feelings and rather to risk trying even what is artificial — as the real artists of life do.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

56. “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

57. “It takes a while for revelry to turn to reverence, and much repetition of truth to eventual turn young zeal into habitual channels for good.” - Elisabeth Elliot

58. “Whatever can be threatened, whatever can be shaken, whatever you fear cannot stand, is destined to crash. Do not go down with the ship. Let that which is destined to become the past slip away. Believe that the real you is that which beckons from the future. If it is a sadder you, it will be a wiser one. And dawn will follow the darkness sooner or later. Rebirth can never come without death.” - Robert M. Price

59. “We are afraid of what we will do to others, afraid of the rage that lies in wait somewhere deep in our souls. How many human beings go through the world frozen with rage against life! This deeply hidden inner anger may be the product of hurt pride or of real frustration in office, factory, clinic, or home. Whatever may be the cause of our frozen rage (which is the inevitable mother of depression), the great word of hope today is that this rage can be conquered and drained off into creative channels ……What should we do? We should all learn that a certain amount of aggressive energy is normal and certainly manageable in maturity. Most of us can drain off the excess of our angry feelings and destructive impulses in exercise, in competitive games, or in the vigorous battles against the evils of nature and society. We also must realize that no one will punish us for the legitimate expression of self-assertiveness and creative pugnacity as our parents once punished us for our undisciplined temper tantrums. Furthermore, let us remember that we need not totally repress the angry part of our nature. We can always give it an outlet in the safe realm of fantasy. A classic example of such fantasy is given by Max Beerborn, who made a practice of concocting imaginary letters to people he hated. Sometimes he went so far as to actually write the letters and in the very process of releasing his anger it evaporated. As mature men and women we should regard our minds as a true democracy where all kinds of ideas and emotions should be given freedom of speech. If in political life we are willing to grant civil liberties to all sorts of parties and programs, should we not be equally willing to grant civil liberties to our innermost thoughts and drives, confident that the more dangerous of them will be outvoted by the majority within our minds? Do I mean that we should hit out at our enemy whenever the mood strikes us? No, I repeat that I am suggesting quite the reverse—self-control in action based upon (positive coping mechanisms such as) self expression in fantasy.” - Joshua Loth Liebman

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Zeb was kindergarten teacher--a good one. I always thought it was because he was the same emotional age as his students.” - Molly Harper

63. “Gray is not a substitute for black and white. You don’t bump into people without saying you’re sorry. When you shake hands, it’s supposed to mean something. If someone is in trouble, you reach out.” - Jon Huntsman

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

65. “Buddha is our inherent nature—our buddha nature—and what that means is that if you’re going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have. It’s not like some intelligence that’s going to be transplanted into you. If you’re going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you’re going to be a grown-up—which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation—it’s because you will allow something that’s already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you allow it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried. Someone once told me, “When you feel afraid, that’s ‘fearful buddha.’” That could be applied to whatever you feel. Maybe anger is your thing. You just go out of control and you see red, and the next thing you know you’re yelling or throwing something or hitting someone. At that time, begin to accept the fact that that’s “enraged buddha.” If you feel jealous, that’s “jealous buddha.” If you have indigestion, that’s “buddha with heartburn.” If you’re happy, “happy buddha”; if bored, “bored buddha.” In other words, anything that you can experience or think is worthy of compassion; anything you could think or feel is worthy of appreciation.” - Pema Chodron

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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.” - Dave Eggers

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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “I have leveled with the girls - from Anchorage to Amarillo.I tell them that all marriages are happyIt's the living together afterward that's tough.I tell them that a good marriage is not a gift,It's an achievement.that marriage is not for kids It takes guts and maturity.It separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.I tell them that marriage is tested dily by the ability to compromise.Its survival can depend on being smart enough to know what's worth fighting about.Or making an issue of or even mentioning.Marriage is giving - and more important, it's forgiving.And it is almost always the wife who must do these things.Then, as if that were not enough, she must be willing to forget what she forgave.Often that is the hardest part.Oh, I have leveled all right.If they don't get my message, Buster,It's because they don't want to get it.Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocalsBecause nobody wants to red the small print in dreams.” - Ann Landers

76. “Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you.” - Erich Fromm

77. “Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.” - Alain De Botton

78. “They drove back to her house in silence. Terrance pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the engine. Turning toward her, he said, “Khadejah, I really like you a lot and I don’t want to hurt you. But I’m not a virgin and I like to have sex. If we’re going to keep seeing each other, you’ve got to make a decision, because if I can’t get it from you I’ll get it from someone else.” He looked her straight in her tear-filled eyes. “I need to know whether to get a room for after the concert. Let me know tomorrow.” He reached over and opened her door. Khadejah didn’t say a word. She got out of the car and went into the house.Terrance sat there for a few minutes wondering if he was being fair. She had to know that he was having sex. Damn, I should feel honored that she’s still a virgin, he thought. Shit, I’ll just have my cake and eat it, too.Ten minutes later, Terrance was knocking on Adrienne’s door. “Hey, can I come in?” - Tracy L. Darity

79. “I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.” - Geraldine Brooks

80. “Grass that is here today and gone tomorrow does not require much time to mature. A giant oak tree that lasts for generations requires much more time to grow strong.” - Henry T. Blackaby