The future is now. It’s time to grow up and be strong. Tomorrow may well be too late.
There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
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.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
Growing up is hard. Otherwise everyone would do it.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.
Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.
The question isn’t so much, Are you parenting the right way? as it is: Are you the adult you want your child to grow up to be?
It’s not a question of God ‘sending’ us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.