OLD AGE QUOTES III
quotations about old age
Sixty feels exactly like 50, with aching feet and more forgetfulness.... But your inside person doesn't age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you've ever been.
ANNE LAMOTT
Salon, November 3, 2014
So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
"Broken Music"
Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
Few know how to be old.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
It would be a good appendix to the Art of Living and Dying, if any one would write the Art of Growing Old, and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much fewer, if we did not affect those which attend the more vigorous and active part of our days; but, instead of studying to be wiser, or being contented with our present follies, the ambition of many of us is also to be the same sort of fools we formerly have been.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Tatler, December 21, 1710
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Heartbreak House
You read the past in some old faces.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
The Virginians
In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
In youth all doors open outward; in old age all open inward.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Oft am I by the Women told,
Poor Anacreon, thou grow'st old,
Look how thy hairs are falling all;
Poor Anacreon how they fall.
Whether I grow old or no,
By th' Effects I do not know.
This I know without being told,
'Tis time to Live, if I grow Old.
'Tis time short Pleasures now to take;
Of little Life the best to make,
And manage wisely the last Stake.
ANACREON
"Ode X", Odes
The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.
ANDRE GIDE
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
After a man passes sixty, his mischief is mainly in his head.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
As we grow older, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping out minds active and open.
CLINT EASTWOOD
attributed, Sad Sayings
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep ... that have taken hold.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Coming of Age
The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.
TRACY LETTS
August: Osage Country
I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time ... but it's not like that. It happens overnight.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
This week, a 95-year-old woman married a 98-year-old man to become the world's oldest newlyweds. They're registered at Bed, Sponge Bath and Beyond.
JIMMY FALLON
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, March 2, 2012