Quotes on Aging

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

With age, art and life become one.

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

Retire? I'm going to stay in show business until I'm the only one left

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.

When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

At this age, I should be leading a quiet life.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

The trick is to age honestly and gracefully and make it look great, so that everyone looks forward to it.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Anyone who stops learning is old — whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable — regardless of physical capacity.

As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

You live long enough, you lose enough people, you learn to appreciate the memories you have and stop begrudging the ones you never got to make.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Some calamities - the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have come like summer lightning, as bolts from the blue. The looming crisis of America's Ponzi entitlement structure is different. Driven by the demographics of an aging population, its causes, timing and scope are known.