Quotes on Aging

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.

A grandmother's special calling is to pray and to be a fellow worker in the battle in which her children or her grandchildren are engaged.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, 'I'm six and a half.' You know, we could be saying, 'I'm fifty and a half' and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you're wrinkled.

I'm proud of my wrinkles. They give my face character. As an actress, you mess with that at your peril.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

Time marches on and sooner or later you realize it is marching across your face.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.

Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.

I can't tell you how many doctors try to sell me a facelift. I've even gone as far as having someone talk me into it, but when I went over and looked at pictures of myself, I thought 'What are they going to lift?' . . Frankly, I think that in the art of aging well there's this sexuality to having those imperfections. It's sensual.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.