Quotes about age-and-aging

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

— Charles M. Schulz

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

— Irene Mayer Selznick

As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.

— Seneca

There is nothing more despicable than an old man who has no other proof than his age to offer of his having lived long in the world.

— Seneca

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

— J. P. Senn

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. [Merchant Of Venice]

— William Shakespeare

Youth is full of sport, age's breath is short; youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame.

— William Shakespeare

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

— William Shakespeare

I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have.

— William Shakespeare

I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.

— William Shakespeare

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!

— William Shakespeare

My age is as a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.

— William Shakespeare

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

— George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The golden age is before us, not behind us.

— St. Simon

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.

— Sydney Smith

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

— Germaine De Stael

A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

— Sir Richard Steele

That man never grows old who keeps a child in his heart.

— Sir Richard Steele

The trick is growing up without growing old.

— Casey Stengel

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

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.

— I. F. Stone

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

— Tom Stoppard

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

— Abraham Sutzkever

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

— Jonathan Swift

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

— Jonathan Swift

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

— Jonathan Swift

Old things are always in good repute, present things in disfavor.

— Publius Cornelius Tacitus

There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others.

— Sir William Temple

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

— Terence

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

— Tholuck

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

— Henry David Thoreau

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

— Henry David Thoreau

How earthy old people become --moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

— Henry David Thoreau

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.

— James Thurber

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen 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 twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

— James Thurber

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

— Leon Trotsky

I will never give in to old age until I become old. And I'm not old yet!

— Tina Turner

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.

— Thomas Tusser

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.

— Mark Twain

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

— Mark Twain

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

— Mark Twain

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.

— Mark Twain

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.

— Samuel Ullman

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

— Samuel Ullman

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

— Samuel Ullman

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.

— Samuel Ullman

It is a toss up whether it is worse to be old and bent or young and broke.

— Source Unknown

An old-timer is one who remembers when it cost more to run a car than to park it.

— Source Unknown

If you're starting to look wrinkled, don't worry. It covers the scars.

— Source Unknown

In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod --always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults --rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

— Source Unknown

Age withers only the outside.

— Source Unknown

Maturity is that time when the mirrors in our mind turn to windows and instead of seeing the reflection of ourselves we see others.

— Source Unknown

Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.

— Source Unknown

Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about it.

— Source Unknown

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

— Source Unknown

We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

— Source Unknown

When we are young we take pains to be agreeable, and when we are old we take pains not to be disagreeable.

— Source Unknown

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

— Source Unknown

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

— John Updike

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

— Henry Vaughan

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

— Judith Viorst

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

— Virgil

Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.

— Voltaire

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.

— Fay Weldon

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

— Edith Wharton

In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.

— Elwyn Brooks White

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

— Walt Whitman

O Time and change! -- with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

— John Greenleaf Whittier

With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time's malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

— Oscar Wilde

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

— Virginia Woolf

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.

— William Wordsworth

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.

— William Wordsworth

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

— William Butler Yeats

The person of wisdom is the person of years.

— Young

Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.

— Edward Young

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.

— Agatha Christie

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty—they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.end quote

— Martin Buxbaum

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.

— Robert Browning

He that is not handsome at 20, nor strong at 30, nor rich at 40, nor wise at 50, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise.

— George Herbert

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— Benjamin Franklin

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.

— William Shakespeare

The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may number.

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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.

— Ambrose Bierce

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

— Muriel Spark

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

— Oscar Wilde

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

— Henry David Thoreau

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.

— Dorothy L. Sayers

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

— Joyce Carol Oates