Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, just in case, in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

Herzen, Alexander

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

Stael, Germaine De

Growing old is not growing up.

Horton, Doug

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Paul, Jean

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

It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

Dressler, Marie

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

Thoreau, Henry David

10.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

Stoppard, Tom

11.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

Pope, Alexander

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

Kennedy, Rose F.

16.

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

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

18.

We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

Becker, May L.

19.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Kuhn, Maggie

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Getting older is like riding a bicycle, if you don't keep pedalling, you'll fall.

Pepper, Claude D.

23.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

Nuveen, John

24.

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

Brown, Rita Mae

25.

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

Richter, Jean Paul

26.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

Weldon, Fay

27.

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

28.

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

Dressler, Marie

29.

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

30.

We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

The worst old age is that of the mind.

Hazlitt, William

32.

I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.

Christie, Agatha

33.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

34.

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

35.

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!

Day, Doris

36.

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

Landor, Walter Savage

37.

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

Mortimer, John

38.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

Hoagland, Edward

39.

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

40.

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are.

Paige, Leroy ''Satchel''

41.

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

42.

It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow old in my own esteem --and in my esteem age is not estimable.

Byron, Lord

43.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her.

Christie, Agatha

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.

Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing

47.

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

Palmer, Arnold

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.

Kangas, Steve