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

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do --after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

Faulkner, William

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

Curtis, George William

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

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

Defoe, Daniel

It takes a long time to become young.

Picasso, Pablo

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

Mortimer, John

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

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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.

10.

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

Swift, Jonathan

11.

Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, age don't matter.

Paige, Leroy ''Satchel''

12.

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

Beckett, Samuel

13.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

15.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

Palmer, Arnold

16.

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.

17.

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

Browning, Robert

18.

Old people love to give good advice to console themselves for no longer being able to set a bad example.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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.

21.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Auber, Daniel Francois Esprit

23.

Old age is the verdict of life.

Barr, Amelia E.

24.

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

25.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

26.

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

Brown, Captain J.

27.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

28.

A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.

Rostand, Jean

29.

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.

30.

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

Kanin, Garson

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.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

37.

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

Proverb, Irish

38.

The woman who tells her age is either too young to have anything to lose or too old to have anything to gain.

Proverb, Chinese

39.

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

40.

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

Hershfield, Harry

41.

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

42.

Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.

Maurois, Andre

43.

If youth knew; if age could.

Estienne, Henri

44.

Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!

O'Casey, Sean

45.

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

46.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

Trotsky, Leon

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Old age though despised, is coveted by all.

Proverb

50.

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

Kennedy, Rose F.