Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

Hardy, Thomas

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

It takes a long time to become young.

Picasso, Pablo

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

Eliot, T. S.

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.

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

Hope, Bob

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

Old age is not a disease -- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.

Kuhn, Maggie

13.

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

Browning, Robert

14.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

Youth is a blunder, manhood is a struggle and old age a regret.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

Old age though despised, is coveted by all.

Proverb

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.

Bonstettin

20.

Seek ye counsel of the aged for their eyes have looked on the faces of the years and their ears have hardened to the voices of Life. Even if their counsel is displeasing to you, pay heed to them.

Gibran, Kahlil

21.

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

Powell, Anthony

22.

Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.

Young, Edward

23.

I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

Gabriel, Peter

24.

He that is not handsome at 20, nor strong at 30, nor rich at 40, nor wise at 50, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise.

Herbert, George

25.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Larkin, Philip

26.

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

Day, Doris

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

Kanin, Garson

30.

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.

31.

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

Twain, Mark

32.

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

Dressler, Marie

33.

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

34.

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

Bunuel, Luis

35.

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.

Auber, Daniel Francois Esprit

36.

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

Philo

37.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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

39.

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Maturity is that time when the mirrors in our mind turn to windows and instead of seeing the reflection of ourselves we see others.

43.

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.

Child, Lydia M.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

That man never grows old who keeps a child in his heart.

Steele, Sir Richard

48.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Ullman, Samuel

49.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Browning, Robert

50.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

Carey, Joyce