Quotes about age-and-aging

Keep on raging -- to stop the aging.

— The Delltones

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.

— Gerard Depardieu

I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.

— Camille Desmoulins

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.

— Charles Dickens

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]

— Matt Dillon

The disappointment of manhood succeeds the delusion of youth.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Youth is a blunder, manhood is a struggle and old age a regret.

— Benjamin Disraeli

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

— Dorothy Dix

Who soweth good seed shall surely reap; The year grows rich as it groweth old, And life's latest sands are its sands of gold!

— Julia C. R. Dorr

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

— Marie Dressler

It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

— Marie Dressler

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

— Lawrence Durrell

Some men are born old, and some men never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful, we are always young and at last die in youth even when in years would count as old.

— Tryon Edwards

Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow up.

— Tryon Edwards

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem -- in my opinion -- to characterize our age.

— Albert Einstein

I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— T. S. Eliot

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.

— T. S. Eliot

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

— Sigmund Z. Engel

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.

— Desiderius Erasmus

If youth knew; if age could.

— Henri Estienne

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do --after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

— William Faulkner

Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.

— William Feather

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

— Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring. That disgusts me.

— Jane Fonda

Many foxes grow gray but few grow good.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Benjamin Franklin

An old young man, will be a young old man.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

— Peter Gabriel

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.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

— James A. Garfield

Old age is a shipwreck.

— Charles De Gaulle

Seek ye counsel of the aged for their eyes have looked on the faces of the years and their ears have hardened to the voices of Life. Even if their counsel is displeasing to you, pay heed to them.

— Kahlil Gibran

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We must not take the faults of our youth with us into old age, for age brings along its own defects.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Rejoice that you have still have a long time to live, before the thought comes to you that there is nothing more in the world to see.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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.

— William Golding

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.

— Baltasar Gracian

The misery of the middle-aged woman is a gray and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resentment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.

— Germaine Greer

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.

— Germaine Greer

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.

— Germaine Greer

You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

— John Greier

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.

— Gene Hackman

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

— Thomas Hardy

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

— Corra May Harris

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

— Sidney J. Harris

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

— Jane Harrison

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

— Goldie Hawn

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

— Benjamin Haydon

Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

— Helen Hayes

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

— William Hazlitt

The worst old age is that of the mind.

— William Hazlitt

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

— Ernest Hemingway

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

— Harry Hershfield

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, just in case, in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

— Alexander Herzen

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

— Edward Hoagland

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.

— Eric Hoffer

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

— Eric Hoffer

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.

— Eric Hoffer

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

— Bob Hope

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

— Bob Hope

Growing old is not growing up.

— Doug Horton

Those who search beyond the natural limits will retain good hearing and clear vision, their bodies will remain light and strong, and although they grow old in years they will remain able-bodied and flourishing; and those who are able-bodied can govern to

— Huang Ti

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

— Victor Hugo

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

— Victor Hugo

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.

— Dean William R. Inge

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

— Washington Irving

How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?

— William James

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

— Thomas Jefferson

At last now you can be what the old cannot recall and the young long for in dreams, yet still include them all.

— Elizabeth Jennings

Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

— Sarah Orne Jewett

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

— Johnson

Talking is the disease of age.

— Ben Johnson

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

— Samuel Johnson

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

— Samuel Johnson

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

— Carl Jung

The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies far away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and woman, old age is upon us.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.

— Steve Kangas

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

— Garson Kanin

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

— Rose F. Kennedy

A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.

— Dorothea Kent

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.

— Søren Kierkegaard

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

— KaThe Kollwitz

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

— Louis Kronenberger

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

— Maggie Kuhn

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

— Maggie Kuhn

As one grows older, one becomes wiser and more foolish.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Few people know how to be old.

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

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

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld