Quotes on Old People

I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. "Don't complain about growing old - many, many people do not have that privilege."

We are always the same age inside.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

I don’t think that anyone has really told (people) what design is. It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed--that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed. Even foods are designed now. So in the process of helping people understand this, making them more aware of the fact that the world around us is something that somebody has control of, perhaps they can feel some sense of control, too. I think that’s a nice ambition.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money. Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

I can think of no better way of redeeming this tragic world today than love and laughter. Too many of the young have forgotten how to laugh, and too many of the elders have forgotten how to love. Would not our lives be lightened if only we could all learn to laugh more easily at ourselves and to love one another?

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

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.