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Aging and Old Age Quotes and Quotations
 Age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill.  All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I? All would live long, but none would be old. An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too, and that maketh him very wary. An old man loved is Winter with flowers. An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years. But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, alias! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now most I selle. Grow old with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hands Who sayeth "a whole I plant, Youth shows but half; Trust God; see all nor be afraid." Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed. Here's a new day. 0 Pendulum move slowly! I am 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were 15 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 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40. I am just turning 40 and taking my time about it. I haven't asked you to make me young again. All I want is to go on getting older. I refuse to admit that I am more than 52, even if that makes my sons illegitimate. If I'd known I was gonna live this long (100 years), I'd have taken better care of myself. If the young only knew; if the old only could. Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance? Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden deaths do. Old age is the Outpatient's Dept of purgatory. Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned. The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible. The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual. There is many a good tune played on an old fiddle. Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines. To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent -that is to triumph over old age. We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living. Wrinkles - the service stripes of life. To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of 'not going'! A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating. The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one. Middle age: when you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. No Spring, nor Summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one Autumnal face. If you live long enough the venerability factor creeps in; you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had. I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left. - Voltaire Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form. Old age is an island surrounded by death. It is time to be old, To take in sail. I feel age like an icicle down my back. Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration. Dignity, high station, or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age. The young feel tired at the end of an action; The old at the beginning. Old foxes want no tutors. Old birds are hard to pluck. A man of fifty looks as old as Santa Claus to a girl of twenty. How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are? The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him. Zsa Zsa Gabor, when asked which of the Gabor women was the oldest, said "She'll never admit it, but I believe it is Mama." When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings. When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past. . . And when you are seventy, nearly all of you. To an old man any place that's warm is homeland. By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle. One trouble with growing older is that it gets progressively tougher to find a famous historical figure who didn't amount to much when he was your age. Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age. Middle age is youth without its levity, And age without decay. And he (King David) died in a good old age, full of days, riches and honour. - Bible I never dared be radical when young For fear it would make me conservative when old. Old age is by nature rather talkative. - Cicero Old age, especially an honoured old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth. - Cicero Age has a good mind and sorry shanks. To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am. Few people know how to be old. First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down. I really believe that more harm is done by old men who cling to their influence than by young men who anticipate it. He had come to that time in his life (it varies for every man) when a human being gives himself over to his demon or to his genius, according to a mysterious law which orders him either to destroy or to surpass himself. The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind. It is always in season for old men to learn. So, lively brisk old fellow, don't let age get you down. White hairs or not, you can still be a lover. - Goethe He that has seen both sides of fifty has lived to little purpose if he has no other views of the world than he had when he was much younger. Let us respect gray hairs, especially our own. The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines. - Plato A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbours: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost: and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp. An old codger, rampant, and still learning. A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time. Many a man that couldn't direct ye to th' drug store on th' corner when he was thirty will get a respectful hearin' when age has further impaired his mind. The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood. Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure. The arctic loneliness of age. When pain ends, gain ends too. No gains without pains. Longevity is having a chronic disease and taking care of it. Age is a high price to pay for maturity. I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old - many people don't have that privilege.' When I was very young, I was disgracefully intolerant but when I passed the thirty mark I prided myself on having learned the beautiful lesson that all things were good, and equally good. That, however, was really laziness. Now, thank goodness, I've sorted out what matters and what doesn't. And I'm beginning to be intolerant again. It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child, while not being loved as a child is loved, but merely being kept alive against one's will. Happy the man who gains sagacity in youth, but thrice happy he who retains the fervour of youth in age. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. - Bible I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years. How beautifully the leaves grow old. How full of light and colour are their last days. In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish. What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease. The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions. To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable. Yes, I'm 68, but when I was a boy I was too poor to smoke, so knock off ten years. That makes me 58. And since I never developed the drinking habit, you can knock off ten more years. So I'm 48 - in the prime of my life. Retire? Retire to what? Life has got to be lived - that's all there is to it. At seventy, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that 'this, too, shall pass!' Senescence begins And middle age ends, The day your descendants Outnumber your friends. On the day of his death, in his eightieth year, Elliot, 'the Apostle of the Indians,' was found teaching an Indian child at his bedside. 'Why not to rest from your labours now?' asked a friend. 'Because,' replied the venerable man, 'I have prayed God to render me useful in my sphere, and he has heard my prayers; for now that I can no longer preach, he leaves me strength enough to teach this poor child the alphabet.' As the world is wearie of me so am I of it. Middle age is when you have a choice of two temptations and choose the one that will get you home earlier. No wise man ever wished to be younger. Every man who has lived his life to the full should, by the time his senior years are reached, have established a reserve inventory of unfinished thinking. For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of the harvest. My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience. I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things aren't what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. It's never too late to have a fling For autumn is just as nice as spring And it's never too late to fall in love. Growing old - it's not nice, but it's interesting. If you think that I am going to bother myself again before I die about social improvement, or read any of those stinking upward and onwarders - you err - I mean to have some good out of being old. They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much. I have learned little from the years that fly; but I have wrung the colour from the years. 
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