Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

To me -- old age is always ten years older than I am.

Buruch, Andre B.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

Thoreau, Henry David

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

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

If youth knew; if age could.

Estienne, Henri

In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.

Billings, Josh

If you wouldn't live long, live well; for folly and wickedness shorten life.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

Hoagland, Edward

13.

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

Meredith, George

14.

I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

Swift, Jonathan

16.

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.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

17.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Eliot, George

19.

The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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

21.

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

22.

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

Defoe, Daniel

23.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

Philo

24.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

Weldon, Fay

25.

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap into this source, you will truly have defeated age.

Loren, Sophia

26.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, Why not? and the other, Why bother?

Harris, Sidney J.

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

Mortimer, John

30.

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

Paul, Jean

31.

A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Maugham, W. Somerset

33.

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

Bleasdale, Alan

34.

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.

35.

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

Virgil

36.

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

Vaughan, Henry

37.

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

38.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Ullman, Samuel

39.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Lerner, Max

40.

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

Arden, Elizabeth

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.

Selznick, Irene Mayer

44.

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

Proverb

45.

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

Yeats, William Butler

46.

The tendency of old age to the body, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified.

Boyse, J. F.

47.

Old men are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for their inability to give bad examples.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

48.

Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

49.

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

Richter, Jean Paul

50.

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