Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Age and aging

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Hoffer, Eric

I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.

Shakespeare, William

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

Johnson

Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Hoffer, Eric

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

Proverb

Age doesn't matter, unless you're cheese.

Burke, Billie

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

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

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

Woolf, Virginia

10.

An old man loved is winter with flowers.

Proverb, German

11.

Minds ripen at very different ages.

Montagu, Elizabeth

12.

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

Brookner, Anita

13.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

Tholuck

14.

In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.

White, Elwyn Brooks

15.

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

16.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

Ali, Muhammad

17.

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.

18.

A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young; not her face.

Burke, Billie

19.

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

Lehrer, Tom

20.

Age considers; youth ventures.

Raupach

21.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

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

Kanin, Garson

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

26.

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

Swift, Jonathan

27.

Growing old is not growing up.

Horton, Doug

28.

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

Sayers, Dorothy L.

29.

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

Palmer, Arnold

30.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

31.

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

Kennedy, Rose F.

32.

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

33.

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

Yeats, William Butler

34.

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

35.

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

36.

A lady of a certain age, which means certainly aged.

Byron, Lord

37.

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.

38.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

Ullman, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

Richards, Keith

42.

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

43.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

44.

To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us.

Hazlitt, William

45.

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

46.

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

Kronenberger, Louis

47.

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

48.

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

Hugo, Victor

49.

If youth knew; if age could.

Estienne, Henri

50.

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.

Temple, Sir William