Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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.

Best Quotes about Age and aging

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

The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

Ball, Lucille

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

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Oates, Joyce Carol

The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

O'Neill, Eugene

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.

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

Sayers, Dorothy L.

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

Proverb, English

12.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

Marquis, Don

13.

Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.

Cass, Eli

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

Curtis, George William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.

Churchill, Winston

21.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

Twenty years a child; twenty years running wild; twenty years a mature man --and after that, praying.

Proverb, Irish

23.

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.

24.

The worst old age is that of the mind.

Hazlitt, William

25.

Don't just count your years, make your years count.

Meyers, Ernest

26.

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

27.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

Cato The Elder

29.

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese

Burke, Billie

30.

Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.

Swift, Jonathan

31.

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

32.

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

Johnson

33.

The older we get the more we must limit ourselves if we wish to be active.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

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

Day, Doris

36.

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

Woolf, Virginia

37.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

Beauvoir, Simone De

38.

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

Bible

39.

It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

Dressler, Marie

40.

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.

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring. That disgusts me.

Fonda, Jane

43.

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.

44.

The golden age is before us, not behind us.

Simon, St.

45.

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

46.

Old age is a shipwreck.

Gaulle, Charles De

47.

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.

48.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Brookner, Anita

50.

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