Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.
Interpretation
Maturity involves balancing what we desire with what we can realistically achieve.
This quote highlights the essence of maturity as a stage in life where individuals learn to reconcile their hopes and dreams with their practical abilities and circumstances. It suggests that true growth comes from understanding our limitations and finding a way to navigate life that incorporates both our ambitions and our realities, leading to a more fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a discussion about personal development during a seminar.
International educational exchange is the most significant current project designed to continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace-eventually even to cooperate in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction....We must try to expand the boundaries of human wisdom, empathy and perception, and there is no way of doing that except through education.
The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
Finally, the Program aims, through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.
In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.
Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.
You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that's just the way it is. It's like learning an instrument, you've got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. And read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.
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