Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

Wordsworth, William

The person of wisdom is the person of years.

Young

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

Arnold, Thomas

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

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

Powell, Anthony

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Allen, Hervey

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

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

While we look not a that things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. [2 Corinthians 4:18]

Bible

13.

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

14.

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.

Temple, Sir William

15.

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

Defoe, Daniel

16.

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

17.

Being seventy is not a sin.

Meir, Golda

18.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.

Plato

19.

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.

Byron, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

22.

It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on-screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that.

Hackman, Gene

23.

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

24.

I think in twenty years I'll be looked at like Bob Hope. Doing those president jokes and golf shit. It scares me.

Murphy, Eddie

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.

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

Schulz, Charles M.

27.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Sutzkever, Abraham

28.

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

29.

It's good to be here. At 98, it's good to be anywhere.

Burns, George

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

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

Ball, Lucille

33.

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

Gabriel, Peter

34.

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.

35.

I always looked to about thirty as the barrier of any real or fierce delight in the passions, and determined to work them out in the younger ore and better veins of the mine --and I flatter myself (perhaps) that I have pretty well done so --and now the dross is coming.

Byron, Lord

36.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Tusser, Thomas

37.

Growing old is not growing up.

Horton, Doug

38.

If you wouldn't live long, live well; for folly and wickedness shorten life.

Franklin, Benjamin

39.

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.

Child, Lydia M.

40.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

41.

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.

42.

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

Selznick, Irene Mayer

43.

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

44.

You are young at any age if you are planning for tomorrow.

45.

The trick is growing up without growing old.

Stengel, Casey

46.

Grow old with me the best is yet to come.

Browning, Robert

47.

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

Billings, Josh

48.

Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

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

Kennedy, Rose F.

50.

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