Motivational Quotes

Age and aging

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

Best Quotes about Age and aging

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

Allen, Hervey

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

Hope, Bob

I always looked to about thirty as the barrier of any real or fierce delight in the passions, and determined to work them out in the younger ore and better veins of the mine --and I flatter myself (perhaps) that I have pretty well done so --and now the dross is coming.

Byron, Lord

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

Ali, Muhammad

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.

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

Old age is not a disease -- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.

Kuhn, Maggie

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

Johnson

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

10.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

11.

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

Buruch, Andre B.

12.

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

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.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

Age does not matter if the matter does not age.

Romulo, Carlos Pena

19.

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.

20.

It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

Brookner, Anita

22.

People of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon and seldom drive business home to it's conclusion, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

Bacon, Francis

23.

An old man loved is winter with flowers.

Proverb, German

24.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Kuhn, Maggie

25.

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Wharton, Edith

26.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

Baruch, Bernard M.

27.

Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I was born of the flesh in 1837, I was born of the spirit in 1855. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit shall live forever.

Moody, Dwight L.

28.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

29.

The older we get the more we must limit ourselves if we wish to be active.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty; for in my youth I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors in my blood; and did not, with unbashful forehead, woo the means of weakness and debility: therefore my age is as a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.

Shakespeare, William

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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.

33.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.

Astaire, Fred

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

Brown, Les

38.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Buck, Pearl S.

39.

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

40.

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

Burroughs, John

41.

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

42.

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

43.

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

Jung, Carl

44.

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.

45.

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

Woolf, Virginia

46.

It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on-screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that.

Hackman, Gene

47.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

Marquis, Don

48.

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.

Auber, Daniel Francois Esprit

49.

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

50.

The woman who tells her age is either too young to have anything to lose or too old to have anything to gain.