Dag Hammarskjöld on maturity

Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

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

Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007Cat’s Cradle (1963), Chapter 88

• Laughter

Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.

Democritus460–360 BCFreeman (1948), p. 152

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

Albert Einstein1879–1955Out of My Later Years (1950), Ch. 2 “Self-Portrait” (1936), p. 5

• Age