Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

Yeats, William Butler

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

If youth knew; if age could.

Estienne, Henri

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

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

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

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

Christie, Agatha

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

Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing

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

10.

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

11.

Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.

Feather, William

12.

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

13.

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

Steele, Sir Richard

14.

My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that Carpe Diem is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds -- for who can trust to tomorrow?

Byron, Lord

15.

I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

Gabriel, Peter

16.

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

Palmer, Arnold

17.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

Beckett, Samuel

21.

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

22.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

Hardy, Thomas

23.

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age.

Einstein, Albert

24.

The older you get the stronger the wind gets -- and it's always in your face.

Nicklaus, Jack

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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.

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

It's good to be here. At 98, it's good to be anywhere.

Burns, George

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.

Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

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

34.

I will never give in to old age until I become old. And I'm not old yet!

Turner, Tina

35.

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.

36.

Rubinstein, Helena

37.

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.

Plato

38.

Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.

Meir, Golda

39.

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

40.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

Thurber, James

41.

I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.

Shakespeare, William

42.

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.

43.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

44.

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

Hugo, Victor

45.

Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.

Swift, Jonathan

46.

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.

47.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

48.

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

49.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

Mead, Margaret

50.

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