OLD AGE QUOTES II
quotations about old age
Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Theodore Roosevelt on Bravery: Lessons from the Most Courageous Leader of the Twentieth Century
If you see old age as a time when you stop doing and stay still, you won't get to experience all the joys of being human: discovering, developing, expanding. There is no age at which we must abandon our dreams and surrender our possibilities.
ANDREA BRANDT
"4 Keys to Increase Your Happiness As You Get Older", Psychology Today, February 1, 2017
What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold
Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.
MARTIN AMIS
Other People
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit is Rich
The tragedy of old age ... is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Mrs. Dalloway
I've finally reached the age where my Wild Oats have turned into All-Bran!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, November 19, 1999
As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Sixty-eighth Birthday
Old age is gentle as an autumn morn;
The harvest over, you will put the plough
Into another, stronger hand, and watch
The sowing you were wont to do.
CARMEN SYLVA
"A Friend"
I'm like a good cheese. I'm just getting mouldy enough to be interesting.
PAUL NEWMAN
The Guardian, April 10, 2005
It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
We have confidence in an old man when holding a position, but lack confidence in him when he is applying for one.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
The old are apt to mistake age for experience, and to imagine they are privileged to give good advice, though they may have lived only to afford bad example.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook K", Aphorisms
Softly comes Old Age, the thief,
Steals the rapture, leaves the throes.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"Scherzo"
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
Bracebridge Hall
Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick