Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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.

Best Quotes about Age and aging

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.

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

Kanin, Garson

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.

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

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Powell, Anthony

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

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

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

10.

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

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

11.

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

Twain, Mark

12.

At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths --your abilities and your failings.

Depardieu, Gerard

13.

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

14.

One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past.

Johnson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

18.

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

19.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Chopra, Deepak

23.

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

Burroughs, John

24.

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

25.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

26.

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

27.

Minds ripen at very different ages.

Montagu, Elizabeth

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

Marx, Groucho

31.

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

Browning, Robert

32.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

33.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

Colton, Charles Caleb

34.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

A woman's always younger than a man at equal years.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

36.

Age. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that remain by reviling those we have no longer the vigor to commit.

Bierce, Ambrose

37.

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

38.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

Thoreau, Henry David

39.

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.

Perry, Ralph B.

40.

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

Child, Lydia M.

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Buck, Pearl S.

43.

I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.

Brown, Rita Mae

44.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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.

47.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.

Darrow, Clarence

48.

Some men are born old, and some men never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful, we are always young and at last die in youth even when in years would count as old.

Edwards, Tryon

49.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

Stael, Germaine De

50.

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