Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

- Dickens, Charles

Best Quotes about Age and aging

The worst old age is that of the mind.

Hazlitt, William

Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.

Morgan, Arthur E.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, Why not? and the other, Why bother?

Harris, Sidney J.

Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

Carter, Lillian

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

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.

Cicero, Marcus T.

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.

Burns, George

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity.

Richter, Jean Paul

11.

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap into this source, you will truly have defeated age.

Loren, Sophia

12.

Old things are always in good repute, present things in disfavor.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

13.

Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.

Golding, William

14.

The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.

Greer, Germaine

15.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

Colton, Charles Caleb

16.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

Rahel

17.

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

Arden, Elizabeth

18.

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

19.

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

Panin, Nikita Ivanovich

20.

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

Greier, John

21.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Stone, I. F.

22.

One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.

Overstreet, Harry A.

23.

I'm like old wine. They don't bring me out very often, but I'm well preserved.

Kennedy, Rose F.

24.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Lessing, Doris

25.

I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have.

Shakespeare, William

26.

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

Virgil

27.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

Tholuck

28.

A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, At my age, I don't even buy green bananas.

Pepper, Claude D.

29.

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

Johnson

30.

The woman who tells her age is either too young to have anything to lose or too old to have anything to gain.

Proverb, Chinese

31.

No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk --handsome, twenty-two year old.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir

32.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

Richter, Jean Paul

33.

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do --after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

Faulkner, William

34.

It is a rare and difficult attainment to grow old gracefully and happily.

Palmer, R.

35.

To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us.

Hazlitt, William

36.

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.

Brown, Captain J.

38.

Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.

Voltaire

39.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

40.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Mittleman, Stu

43.

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

44.

Old people love to give good advice to console themselves for no longer being able to set a bad example.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.

Hope, Bob

46.

With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding. [Job 12:12]

Bible

47.

In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod --always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults --rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

48.

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

49.

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.

Perry, Ralph B.

50.

There are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.

Hawn, Goldie