Ageing Well Quotes

I think there's something about certain people's chosen 'lifestyle' which ages them. I can't explain it any other way. Leaving school, building a career, getting old before their time as they take on more stress lacks that one essential element that we had oodles of as youngsters, and that's fun. We had lively, buoyant and animated fun. We were carefree at an age when you're supposed to be carefree. We were breezy, jaunty and happy-go-lucky ~ Karl Wiggins

At the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in 2012, just a fortnight after the murder of the American ambassador in Benghazi, President Obama talked about the YouTube video his administration were then still saying was behind the attacks. Talking about the excerpt ofa film called Innocence of Muslims, the President of the United States said, before the world's assembly, 'The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.' He didn't say why it 'must not' belong to them any more than it 'must not' belong to the South Park creators who made The Book of Mormon or the ageing Monty Python team who made The Life of Brian. But the question was left to dangle. ~ Douglas Murray

the LP sleeve acquires the same scuffs, knocks and wrinkles as its purchaser. It engenders the same affection as the ageing groove. Reflective ~ Richard Osborne

The youngest member of this ageing community was ex-variety artiste, Patrick L. Balls. Fifty-nine now, he spent out his remaining years pulling a rope lift and bottling fruit. He had once whistled Ave Maria for Queen Victoria. She wasn't present at the time, but nevertheless that's who he was whistling it for. ~ Spike Milligan

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about. ~ S. Jay Olshansky

In an ageing society, it makes sense to support older adults to develop new skills, prolonging their working lives. ~ David Blunkett

Guenever never cared for God. She was a good theologian, but that was all. The truth was that she was old and wise: she knew that Lancelot did care for God most passionately, that it was essential he should turn in that direction. So, for his sake, to make it easier for him, the great queen now renounced what she had fought for all her life, now set the example, and stood to her choice. She had stepped out of the picture.
Lancelot guessed a good deal of this, and, when she refused to see him, he climbed the convent wall with Gallic, ageing gallantry. He waylaid her to expostulate, but she was adamant and brave. Something about Mordred seems to have broken her lust for life. They parted, never to meet on earth. ~ T.H. White

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. ~ Terry Pratchett

I really dislike it when the media asks young actresses, normally when they're about 23, how they feel about ageing. There are other things to worry about. ~ Penelope Cruz

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. ~ Alfred Tennyson

You can't worry about ageing because that's the worst thing. If you start, then you just keep finding more things you don't like, and then you're finished. There are a lot of things I could have done to my face, but it would never stop. ~ China Machado

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines. ~ Joanna Rossiter

I firmly believe that every six years, a person goes through a serious change. Think about it: At 6, you start school. At about 12, you start hitting puberty. And then it goes on. You start hitting these different mental levels, and people change. I think that's part of the reason the divorce rate is so high. ~ Randy Houser

Ageing. We laugh about it, and we groan about it. We resist it, but we cant't stop it. And with the chuckles and wrinkles come serious thoughts and questions about what happens when we die. Is death when we go to sleep? Or is death when we finally wake up? ~ Max Lucado

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted. ~ Roman Payne

Bhikkus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?
The eye is burning, visible forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning; also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact as its condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of greed, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion, with birth, ageing and death, with sorrow, with lamentation, with pain, grief and despair it is burning. ~ Gautama Buddha

It's true about the eyes being the window to the soul. Your face can be etched with worry, and twisted by ageing, but the eyes tell the true story of who you are. ~ Naomie Harris

As the map of the Great Plain was being redrawn by a young Shazarian councillor, the ageing Shylonian king interrupted mid-speech to ask him his name. With a piercing glare and a haughty flick of his cloak, he retorted 'Lord Ratilla, Shazarian Imperial Secretary, and who might you be?' Behind the gasps of horror, the message was clear. It was Shazaria who now bestrode the Amaran world, henceforth the office of Shazarian minister now held greater prestige than even that of foreign monarchs. What became even clearer were the depths of Shazarian treachery. The impudent youth who stood before the kings of Amara stripping them of ancient provinces, was the same adolescent reputed to have delivered an eloquent speech which swayed the Shazarian councillors in favour of war.
Had this been their intention all along? ~ A.H. Septimius

And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be. ~ Samuel Beckett

The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries of hopelessness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence. But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes - the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons - for the big dragons were now harder to come by. ~ Kenneth Minogue

and here instead's another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which sophia is the kind of character she'd choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there's no room for severed heads; a work in which sophia's perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she's in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that's thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank god, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the fut ~ Ali Smith

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling. ~ Robert Conquest

Ageing must be like wearing a heavy, itchy suit. ~ Tom Cardamone

Ageing is nothing to be ashamed of
Especially when the entire race is in it together
Although sometimes it seems that she alone among her friends wants to celebrate getting older
Because it's such a privilege to not die prematurely ~ Bernardine Evaristo

It wasn't getting easier because it isn't supposed to get easier. Midlife was a bitch, and my educated guess was that the climb only got steeper from here. Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life," he wrote. "Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."
... I was writing a new program for the afternoon of life. The scales tipped away from suffering and toward openheartedness and love. [p. 182] ~ Dani Shapiro

There are things I'd wish weren't part of ageing. But what you gain is much more than you're giving up. I don't think you come into your own until you're 35 or so. ~ Cindy Crawford

I think ageing demographics is a bigger issue in China than people think. And the problems it creates should be become evident as early as 2016. ~ Stanley Druckenmiller

The goal is to learn more about telomere length and other markers of ageing, how best to measure these markers, how they are related to health and lifestyle, and how people respond to learning their own telomere length results. ~ Elizabeth Blackburn

Forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. ~ Julian Barnes

I think that laughter and smiling are some of the best antidotes to ageing that you could possibly have. In general, I pretty much think of myself as still being about 5. ~ Demi Moore

At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom - the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February's snow. ~ Herman Melville

I know I'm supposed to say ageing doesn't bother me, then suddenly you're like, 'Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I'm getting old. I'm old!' ~ Tracey Emin

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. ~ Alfred Tennyson

This is what ageing is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unkind moments that catch you when you least expect them. ~ Khaled Hosseini

We know that so many of the conditions and diseases that we associate with ageing can often be prevented or in fact their onset delayed if we just took preventative steps earlier in our lives. ~ Julie Bishop

The problem with memories is they get more valuable with time,
and the places we keep them get weaker with age. ~ Michael Xavier

I really believe less is more. When you get older, too much makeup can be ageing, and when you're young, you should enjoy the fact your skin is free from lines and wrinkles rather than overloading it with products. ~ Louise Nurding

He looked up at her. Age and worry had taken their toll on her frail body, but she was kind and beautiful. And for a moment, memories and thoughts swam to the surface, the world coming into utter clarity. And all of them revolved around Amanda, his wife of fifty years. ~ Crissy Moss

As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along. ~ Julia Gillard

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty ... ~ Edward Gorey