Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

- Beckett, Samuel

Best Quotes about Age and aging

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

Senn, J. P.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

Noonan, Peggy

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.

Browning, Robert

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Durrell, Lawrence

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Ullman, Samuel

There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.

Seneca

Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

Osler, Sir William

10.

In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.

Kangas, Steve

11.

As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.

Seneca

12.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

Viorst, Judith

13.

Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.

Meir, Golda

14.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

15.

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

Dressler, Marie

16.

I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.

Selznick, Irene Mayer

17.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

Palmer, Arnold

18.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

Beckett, Samuel

19.

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty; for in my youth I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors in my blood; and did not, with unbashful forehead, woo the means of weakness and debility: therefore my age is as a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.

Shakespeare, William

20.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Twain, Mark

21.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Stael, Germaine De

22.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Eliot, George

23.

Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

Schulz, Charles M.

24.

Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is -- I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at -- a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.

Byron, Lord

25.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

Harris, Corra May

26.

It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

27.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Updike, John

28.

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

Steele, Sir Richard

29.

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.

Twain, Mark

30.

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.

Richter, Jean Paul

31.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

Spark, Muriel

32.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

Baruch, Bernard M.

34.

I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.

Bleasdale, Alan

35.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

Byron, Lord

36.

An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

37.

Grow old with me the best is yet to come.

Browning, Robert

38.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Buck, Pearl S.

39.

Like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.

Lin Yu-tang

40.

I have never known a person to live to be one hundred and be remarkable for anything else.

Billings, Josh

41.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age.

Einstein, Albert

42.

The older you get the stronger the wind gets -- and it's always in your face.

Nicklaus, Jack

43.

It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death-warrant; but it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in the joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects.

Smith, Sydney

44.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Thoreau, Henry David

45.

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

Meredith, George

46.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Kollwitz, KaThe

47.

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives.

Chevalier, Maurice

48.

We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

Becker, May L.

49.

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

Rubinstein, Helena

50.

We are not limited by our old ages; we are liberate by it.

Mittleman, Stu