age quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Agatha Christie: 

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.

Albert Einstein: 

People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born. letter to Otto Juliusburger

Alfred Adler: 

It is easy to believe that life is long and one's gifts are vast -- easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.

Alice James: 

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Anais Nin: 

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Ashley Montagu: 

I want to die young at a ripe old age.

Benjamin Franklin: 

All would live long, but none would be old.

Billie Burke: 

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.

Carl Jung: 

Among all my patients in the second half of life ... there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.

Cicero: 

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

Clarence Darrow: 

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.

Coco Chanel: 

A woman has the age she deserves.

Cornelius Otis Skinner: 

There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach this stage of wisdom.

Dr. Johnson: 

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.

Edith Wharton: 

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

Edna Ferber: 

Being an old maid is like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation after you have ceased struggling.

Elizabeth Arden: 

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

Eric Hoffer: 

Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunites for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.

Florida Scott-Maxwell: 

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.

Florida Scott-Maxwell: 

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld: 

The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they themselves are no longer able to set a bad example.

H. L. Mencken: 

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: 

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

Helen Hayes: 

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Helen Keller: 

It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance its allotted length.

Henry David Thoreau: 

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Henry David Thoreau: 

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.

Horace Rumpole: 

There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home, Weston-Super-Mare.

Jeanne Moreau: 

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.

Lady Diana Cooper: 

First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful.

Leonard H. Robbins: 

How a minority,
Reaching majority,
Seizing authority,
Hates a minority!

Lionel Trilling: 

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Madeleine L'Engle: 

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Mark Twain - attributed in error: 

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Maurice Chevalier (attributed but unverified): 

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

Norman Vincent Peale: 

Live your life and forget your age.

Ogden Nash: 

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. 
(also attributed to Bernard Baruch in slightly different form)


Oliver Wendell Holmes, jr.: 

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: "The work is done."

Oscar Wilde: 

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Pearl S. Buck: 

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

Pearl S. Buck: 

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.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.

Pearl S. Buck: 

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

Pearl S. Buck: 

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
The Conservative


Robert Frost: 

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.

Robert McAfee Brown: 

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

Sir Arthur Pinero: 

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

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.

Thomas Alva Edison: 

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Though an old man I am but a young gardener.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

Thomas Jefferson: 

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.

Trotsky: 

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

Unknown: 

In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art gallery unattended, for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his old masterpieces.

Virginia Woolf: 

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Voltaire: 

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Whitney Young: 

Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.

Willa Cather: 

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Willa Cather: 

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

William James: 

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young -- or slender.