Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

- Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

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.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Eliot, T. S.

At last now you can be what the old cannot recall and the young long for in dreams, yet still include them all.

Jennings, Elizabeth

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Brookner, Anita

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

Larkin, Philip

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.

10.

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

11.

Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

Schulz, Charles M.

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Stone, I. F.

15.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Tusser, Thomas

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.

The trick is growing up without growing old.

Stengel, Casey

18.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

19.

They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.

Vaughan, Henry

20.

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

21.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

Chopra, Deepak

22.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

23.

Youth is a blunder, manhood is a struggle and old age a regret.

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

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

Christie, Agatha

25.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Oates, Joyce Carol

26.

To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.

Bonstettin

27.

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

28.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

30.

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

Hope, Bob

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 is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

Lehrer, Tom

33.

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

Johnson

34.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

35.

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

36.

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

Senn, J. P.

37.

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.

Beauvoir, Simone De

38.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Becker, May L.

43.

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

44.

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

45.

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

46.

If the young knew and the old could, there is nothing that couldn't be done.

Proverb

47.

It takes a long time to become young.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Kanin, Garson

49.

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

50.

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

Brown, Captain J.