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

The person of wisdom is the person of years.

Young

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

Burke, Billie

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

Swift, Jonathan

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

Schulz, Charles M.

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

Powell, Anthony

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

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.

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

Twain, Mark

10.

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

Burns, George

11.

Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. [Reflecting on his former status as a teen idol]

Dillon, Matt

12.

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

Richter, Jean Paul

13.

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

Proverb, English

14.

You are young at any age if you are planning for tomorrow.

15.

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.

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

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

21.

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

Stael, Germaine De

22.

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

23.

It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death-warrant; but it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in the joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects.

Smith, Sydney

24.

Live your life and forget your age.

Peale, Norman Vincent

25.

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

Dickens, Charles

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Becker, May L.

29.

I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.

Bleasdale, Alan

30.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

31.

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

Cicero, Marcus T.

32.

There are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.

Hawn, Goldie

33.

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

Brookner, Anita

34.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

35.

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

36.

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

Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing

37.

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

Tholuck

38.

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

Paul, Jean

39.

Old age is a shipwreck.

Gaulle, Charles De

40.

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

Twain, Mark

41.

You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.

Hope, Bob

42.

Age considers; youth ventures.

Raupach

43.

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.

44.

I refuse to admit that I am more than 52, even if that makes my children illegitimate.

Astor, Lady Nancy

45.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

46.

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

Yeats, William Butler

47.

It is a rare and difficult attainment to grow old gracefully and happily.

Palmer, R.

48.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Lessing, Doris

49.

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

Meir, Golda

50.

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.