Coming of age

Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question.

— Coming of age

We confound loss of naiveté (a developmental change) with loss of innocence (a spiritual failing). While each person is fated to lose naiveté, no person loses innocence by developmental necessity. Each person loses innocence by his or her own hand.

— Coming of age

Maturity consists in having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

— Coming of age

As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures ... our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.

— Coming of age

The law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

— Coming of age

It is generally supposed that conservatives are usually old people, and that those in favor of change are the young. This is not quite correct. Many conservatives are young people: those who want to live but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life they have seen.

— Coming of age

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

— Coming of age