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 really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!

Day, Doris

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

In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

Bunuel, Luis

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are.

Paige, Leroy ''Satchel''

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

Weldon, Fay

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Mittleman, Stu

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

Kollwitz, KaThe

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

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

The foolishness of old age does not characterize all who are old, but only the foolish.

Cicero, Marcus T.

11.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

Dix, Dorothy

12.

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.

13.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

Auden, W. H.

14.

A lady of a certain age, which means certainly aged.

Byron, Lord

15.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her.

Christie, Agatha

16.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

18.

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

19.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

20.

We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

21.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

22.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

Philo

23.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

Collins, Mortimer

24.

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

Gracian, Baltasar

25.

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

Stael, Germaine De

26.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

It is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

Lehrer, Tom

28.

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

Richter, Jean Paul

29.

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.

Inge, Dean William R.

30.

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

31.

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

Tholuck

32.

How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Lerner, Max

34.

Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Hoffer, Eric

35.

A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye,it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.

Kent, Dorothea

36.

If youth knew; if age could.

Estienne, Henri

37.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

Powell, Anthony

38.

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

Proverb, English

39.

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

Nicklaus, Jack

40.

I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.

Cope, Wendy

41.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield

42.

With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

43.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

Thurber, James

44.

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

45.

Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.

46.

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

47.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Ullman, Samuel

48.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. [Reflecting on his former status as a teen idol]

Dillon, Matt

49.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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.