We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

As you get older, you have more responsibilities; you have more commitments, more events, kids, you’re married now. You still have all the things that you’ve had, plus you just keep adding.

We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I still have mixed feelings about what growing up is – this thing that happens to everyone, so I’ve heard.

I am a child but I have to think and act like a woman, this business forces you to.

Prime time for men is, say, 35 to 45. Then they level off and fall off.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

I think Himalayan climbers tend to mature fairly late. I think most of the successful Himalayan climbers have ranged from 28 to just over 40, really.

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Being the only man in the household with my mom definitely helped me grow up fast.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Jack was out kissing babies while I was out passing bills. Someone had to tend the store.

I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

Nobody can ever make enough money for as many poor relatives as I’ve got. Somebody’s got a sick kid, or somebody needs an operation, somebody ain’t got this, somebody ain’t got that. Or to give the kids all a car when they graduate.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

The prospect of dating someone in her twenties becomes less appealing as you get older. At some point in your life, your tolerance level goes down and you realize that, with someone much younger, there’s nothing really to talk about.

Adults are obsolete children.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

I prefer directing to acting. There is huge freedom that comes from being behind the camera. It brings a lot of responsibilities as well but is intensely rewarding.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

I vote and I do jury duty.

As I grow up, the lessons I learn in love and relationships and how we treat each other are hopefully maturing – hopefully.

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

If you want to become fully mature in the Lord, you must learn to love truth. Otherwise, you will always leave open a door of deception for the enemy to take what is meant to be yours.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Now I am older, I understand we have to accept who we are.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

In football, it’s the job of the player to play, the coach to coach, the official to officiate. Each guy is charged with upholding his end, nothing more. In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

We need an adult in the White House. When making life-or-death, war-or-peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally.

I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout. I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

There are too many people that depend on me. I’m too obligated. I’m in too far to get out.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

My overall look on things is a lot more mature than it used to be.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.