Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

Kronenberger, Louis

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

Engel, Sigmund Z.

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.

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

It is a toss up whether it is worse to be old and bent or young and broke.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Updike, John

Age doesn't matter, unless you're cheese.

Burke, Billie

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Haydon, Benjamin

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

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

Brown, Captain J.

11.

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

Kanin, Garson

12.

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

13.

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

Kollwitz, KaThe

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Rahel

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

Twain, Mark

21.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

Swift, Jonathan

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Nicklaus, Jack

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.

Cicero, Marcus T.

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Burke, Billie

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The older woman's love is not love of herself, nor of herself mirrored in a lover's eyes, nor is it corrupted by need. It is a feeling of tenderness so still and deep and warm that it gilds every grass blade and blesses every fly. It includes the ones who have a claim on it, and a great deal else besides. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Greer, Germaine

38.

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

39.

People of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon and seldom drive business home to it's conclusion, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

Bacon, Francis

40.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Ullman, Samuel

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow up.