One might characterize the whole first half of life as a gigantic mistake, as necessary as it is unavoidable. The task of the second half of life is to recover from that mistake, to move from the adapted self to the authentic self.
Source - James Hollis, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life (Inner City Books 1995), p. 129.
When the psychological self – the adult imago – is constituted and fully realized in the second half of life, a person acquires with it the freedom to expand and deploy the expression of psychic energy in a distinctive and highly creative way. The imago opens new vistas, while it also defines the individual's psychological style. It brings this capacity to the personality because it draws together the most important opposites in the individual psyche – the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the conscious and the unconscious – into a singular pattern. The formation of the imago is the precondition for full adult freedom to be oneself and to become the person one most deeply longs to be. Constraints imposed by an earlier persona formation, by social and psychological limits placed upon the individual by a psychosocial identity, are largely surmounted through the active presence of the imago. With this symbolic formation, a personality becomes free to experience and to express a much greater degree of inherent wholeness than was possible previously. The imago is equivalent to adult integrity.
Source - Murray Stein, Transformation: Emergence of the Self (Texas A&M University Press 2005), pp. 107-108.
All the psychological and physiological conditions which test integrity – fear, desire, hunger, fatigue, disaffection, anger, pain – have little reality in memory or anticipation but rather exist for the most part in the narrow immediacy of the present. The person of integrity is a continuous person, for whom the present is a point on a line drawn out of memory and into the willed future, rather than an unpredicted and unwieldy configuration which seems to operate under its own laws.
Source - Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 1997), p. 51.
Art: Delphine Diallo, 'God is a Woman'