“Maturity is not always reflected in age, but in an attitude of acceptance, appreciation and care for others.”
Last update Nov. 30, 2023.
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“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”
William James
(1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist
Abraham Joshua Heschel
(1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi
Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5
“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.”
Source: House of Leaves
“I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I do not care what face other ages and other people have given to the enormous, faceless essence. They have crammed it with human virtues, with rewards and punishments, with certain ties. They have given a face to their hopes and fears, they have submitted their anarchy to a rhythm, they have found a higher justification by which to live and labor. They have fulfilled their duty.
But today we have gone beyond these needs; we have shattered this particular mask of the Abyss; our God no longer fits under the old features.
Our hearts have overbrimmed with new agonies, with new luster and silence. The mystery has grown savage, and God has grown greater. The dark powers ascend, for they have also grown greater, and the entire human island quakes.
Let us stoop down to our hearts and confront the Abyss valiantly. Let us try to mold once more, with our flesh and blood, the new, contemporary face of God.
For our God is not an abstract thought, a logical necessity, a high and harmonious structure made of deductions and speculations.
He is not an immaculate, neutral, odorless, distilled product of our brains, neither male nor female.
He is both man and woman, mortal and immortal, dung and spirit. He gives birth, fecundates, slaughters — death and eros in one — and then he begets and slays once more, dancing spaciously beyond the boundaries of a logic which cannot contain the antinomies.
John C. Maxwell
(1947) American author, speaker and pastor
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 32
Martin Esslin
(1918–2002) Playwright, theatre critic, scholar
Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd (1961)
Context: The Theatre of the Absurd … can be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time.  The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions. The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, nationalism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war.
“Architecture reflects society, and this is not a great age.”
Richard Roth, Jr.
American architect
Source: As quoted in Meredith L. Clausen, "The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream" http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E6qRuyzOogIC&pg=PA275&lpg=PA275&dq=%22Unfortunately,+buildings+are+not+like+drawings.+You+can%27t+just+erase+them.%22&source=bl&ots=wkwiw7U92A&sig=4fGIk_ufWMT3wv_c6l6k8uaYMv0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HYlHVNHNJ4Lb7Aa86oHwCA&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Unfortunately%2C%20buildings%20are%20not%20like%20drawings.%20You%20can%27t%20just%20erase%20them.%22&f=false, p.276