Quotes on Aging

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

The heart never grows better by age; I fear rather worse, always harder. A young liar will be an old one, and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.

You know you've reached middle age when you're cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police.

Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.

The evening of a well spent youth brings it's lamps with it.

A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man's age represents a fine cargo of experience and memories.

It is always the season for the old to learn.

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

A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!

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.

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

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.

Too many people, when they get old, think that they have to live by the calendar.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Time glides away and as we get older through the noiseless years; the days flee and are restrained by no reign.

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.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

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

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