Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.

- Greer, Germaine

Best Quotes about Age and aging

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

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

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Maugham, W. Somerset

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

Panin, Nikita Ivanovich

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

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Jung, Carl

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

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

10.

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

11.

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

Greier, John

12.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

I refuse to admit that I am more than 52, even if that makes my children illegitimate.

Astor, Lady Nancy

14.

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.

15.

Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

16.

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

Virgil

17.

With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

18.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, Why not? and the other, Why bother?

Harris, Sidney J.

19.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Hoffer, Eric

20.

In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don't know, but they do.

Neal, Patricia

21.

The person of wisdom is the person of years.

Young

22.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

23.

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

24.

The worst old age is that of the mind.

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

26.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

27.

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

28.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

Byron, Lord

29.

When we are young we take pains to be agreeable, and when we are old we take pains not to be disagreeable.

30.

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

Swift, Jonathan

31.

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives.

Chevalier, Maurice

32.

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.

33.

Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life.

Richter, Jean Paul

34.

I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.

Bleasdale, Alan

35.

Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is -- I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at -- a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.

Byron, Lord

36.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

Hugo, Victor

37.

How can I die? I'm booked.

Burns, George

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

Thurber, James

43.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

Ullman, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

46.

To me -- old age is always ten years older than I am.

Buruch, Andre B.

47.

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

48.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

49.

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

Greer, Germaine

50.

Old age is the verdict of life.

Barr, Amelia E.