Old Age Quotes

the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But ~ G.K. Chesterton

So long as our parents are alive, we are children. Then we become childish. ~ Ljupka Cvetanova

I began auditioning for acting jobs at the ripe old age of 12. Thirty years later, including a 15-year run on television, I sometimes just get offers for work. Often, however, I am still required to run pell-mell around Los Angeles or New York, interviewing for film and TV jobs. ~ Diane Farr

I wept for relationships not possible due to denial and dreams locked in the back of people's minds, all of the bits of life that lay dormant until the babblings of televisions and nursing homes sweep them away. It makes me wonder how many of the dreams we had originally have already been forgotten. ~ Christopher Hawke

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. ~ Donald Hall

The day you stop getting excited about Christmas is the day you become officially old. ~ Stewart Stafford

Smell the aroma of beautiful food, then
go to the latrine and sniff. "What happened to you?" Your dung will answer,
"My beauty was a lure, a trick to get inside you."
Every matter particle does the same
enchantment. Try to see the beginning and end at once. Would you willingly wear manacles
just because they're made of gold? Admire the genius of an artist, but also watch what
happens to him or her in old age, how the expert craftsman's craft diminishes. ~ Rumi

The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god? ~ C.S. Lewis

[I have] a deeply entrenched rule that I cannot rest or relax until all my work is done. What a deal. I could die of old age before I have met all my responsibilities and done all my chores. ~ Mary Pipher

A century ago, life screwed that poor man and me because we were too young, and now they want to do the same thing because we are too old. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I believe we must do things in our lives for the right reasons, because we enjoy doing them, with no expectation of getting something back in return. Otherwise, we are constantly being disappointed." She moved her turquoise bracelet back and forth on her wrist. "So I had two sons, John and Richard, because I wanted to, not because I thought they would rescue me in old age. I got out of all social organizations and clubs in my fifties so I could spend time with my grandchildren, not because they would give something back to Jack and me later on, but because that was what I wanted to do
and I have loved doing it. Believe me, these have been selfish decisions. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. ~ Jack Kerouac

Swallowing back her bitterness, Amelia glanced up at her brother and managed a rueful smile. "Thank you, but at this advanced stage of life, I have no ambitions to marry."
Leo surprised her by bending to brush a light kiss on her forehead. His voice was soft and kind. "Be that as it may, I think someday you'll meet a man worth giving up your independence for." He grinned before adding, "Despite your encroaching old age. ~ Lisa Kleypas

It was funny, in her old age, to look back and see for how short a period her nest had NOT been empty. Relatively speaking, it was nothing - empty far longer than full. so much of herself had been invested in those children; who could believe how briefly they'd been with her. ~ Anne Tyler

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills. ~ Richard J. Needham

Getting older seems to but does not make us even more mortal. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Immature thought is predominately purposive and utopian. Thought which rejects purpose altogether is the thought of old age. Mature thought combines purpose with observation and analysis. ~ Edward Hallett Carr

In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death. These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway. ~ Mario Monicelli

Faith, courage, optimism, looking forward, bring us new life and more life. Futility, frustration, living in the past are not only characteristic of 'old age'; they contribute to it. ~ Maxwell Maltz

Autumn is a hint from God to Old Age. ~ Austin O'Malley

It's one of the terrors of old age that your body is not your friend. Or to be out on the street and be frightened of someone because you're not in good shape and can't do anything about it. ~ Israel Horovitz

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ~ Julian Barnes

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard there's nothing you can do. ~ Golda Meir

Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces. ~ Robert Henri

Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last. ~ Lydia M. Child

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old. ~ George Orwell

That folly of old age which is called dotage is peculiar to silly old men, not to age itself. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

When old folks laugh,
they consider the promise
of dear painless death, and generously
forgive life for happening
to them. ~ Maya Angelou

Embrace the glory of age. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident. ~ Elbert Hubbard

I don't know what's happened to me. I've got a bit more sophisticated in my old age. I like a bit of jasmine tea. I love it. ~ Danny Dyer

Old age is when you are not bothered with bad dreams, but with bad reality. ~ Faina Ranevskaya

All I can say, in answer to this kind queries [of friends] is that I have not the distemper called the Plague; but that I have allthe plagues of old age, and of a shattered carcase. ~ Lord Chesterfield

Victims of misfortune are quick to sense another of their kind from a distance, but in old age they rarely become friends, which is in no way surprising: they have nothing to share together - not even hope. ~ Ivan Turgenev

Try to imagine its good old days whenever you see a ruin and try to do the same whenever you see an old person! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Death is coming - but hopefully not before old age, decrepitude, and senility. ~ Jarod Kintz

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals? ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is.
They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need ~ Aldous Huxley

A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free. ~ William Wordsworth

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Mary had become anxious in her old age, and she hated being away from the house for long. She'd hold the girls' hands tightly and calm herself by telling them what she would make for first frost that year- pork tenderloins with nasturtiums, dill potatoes, pumpkin bread, chicory coffee. And the cupcakes, of course, with all different frostings, because what was first frost without frosting? Claire had loved it all, but Sydney had only listened when their grandmother talked of frosting. Caramel, rosewater-pistachio, chocolate almond. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

How old are you?"
"Ten," answered Tangle.
"You don't look like it," said the lady.
"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle.
"Thousands of years old," answered the lady.
"You don't look like it," said Tangle.
"Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am! ~ George MacDonald

Old men's prayers for death are lying prayers, in which they abuse old age and long extent of life. But when death draws near, not one is willing to die, and age no longer is a burden to them. ~ Euripides

Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with the caution of life-all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

What if experience is disappointment, and a human's old age has no sense, and all what we acquire in our lifetime is a habit for disappointment? ~ Lara Biyuts

Every woman should have a youth she's content to leave behind and a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to telling it in her old age ~ Pamela Redmond Satran

She would talk of castles and princesses and a woman named Scheherazade who had a thousand and one stories to tell. Shadow loved it when Emma told him her dreams. With her little warm fingers, Emma stroked his head as if he were but a puppy with all the strength of his youth yet to come, for the greatest joy in life is the conviction that we are loved in spite of ourselves. His legs may have been faded yellow but Shadow knew that he was loved by Theo's daughter. ~ Steven James Taylor

As different as Emily Dickinson's parents' life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande's in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they'd raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state - something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande's life to Alice Hobson's? ~ Atul Gawande

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

Few ever lived to old age, and fewer still ever became distinguished, who were not in the habit of early rising. ~ John Todd

Books are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions by night, in traveling, in the country. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

I Didn't Ask to Be a Senior Citizen (I Was Drafted) ~ Doug Jensen

As long as your life is a succession of love stories, you can never grow old. ~ James Marquess

Too many men have died in the name of old age. I know, because my grandmother was one of them. ~ Jarod Kintz

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself ... ~ Philip Larkin

Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refired. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect cup
thin, strong, translucent?" He held his cup to the light. " All impurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that
more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection." He drained his cup and he said loudly, "Cal, listen to me. Can you think that whatever made us
would stop trying? ~ John Steinbeck

Keep moving. It's hard for old age to hit a moving target. ~ Joan Rivers

Old age is not a good thing. It can be really hard, and those of us who have it a little easier should keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not as well off. ~ Grace Paley

The hare grows old as she plays in the sun
And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;
Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done
She limps along in an aged whiteness ... ~ William Butler Yeats

The concept of deferred gratification, or sacrificing now to save for the future, can be helpful in setting aside money in a retirement account for old age. It can also serve as an effective rationalization for life avoidance. ~ Chris Guillebeau

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned. ~ Gerald Brenan

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls. ~ Timothy Schaffert

We are afraid of the old age which we may never attain. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Old age is life's parody. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. ~ Mark Twain

I see," acknowledged Axel. "But it's not really your hunting trophy anyway, is it? I mean one that you collected yourself... Unless it died of old age, that is, right at your feet. ~ Aaron D'Este

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits. ~ Rebecca West

To love is a pleasure of youth, a sin in old age. ~ Publilius Syrus

Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving. ~ Toni Morrison

May you keep dreaming until the day you die. May imagination overtake memory. May you die young at a ripe old age. ~ Mark Batterson

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal - but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell. ~ Philip Ball

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head - but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship. ~ Charles Stross

Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure. ~ Nicholas Sparks

When you're young you can't work out the age of an adult - they're just quite old, old, or very old. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Old age is the lubricant of belief. When death knocks at the door, skepticism flies out the window. A serious cardiovascular fright and a person will even believe in Little Red Riding Hood. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Old age tells us that we ourselves have failed often, have never really done anything completely right, have never truly been perfect - anad that is completely all right. We are who we are - and so is everyone else. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum. ~ Thomas Szasz

One of the roles of man is to shut his eyes and keep them shut to see if he can continue into the night of his old age the dream curtailed in the night of his youth. ~ Machado De Assis

Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The greatest trick you can teach an old dog is how to learn new tricks. ~ J.S. Davey

Old age is a humble victory in this killing universe. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It seemed as if the longer she lived, the more was taken from her. Not gradually, as old age fell into the inevitable, but lobbed off in great chunks, the healthy branches sacrificed along with the frail. ~ Shelley Noble

Forgetting things is what gives old age a bad name, that and old age. ~ Peg Bracken

The only real time as far as Buddhism is concerned is right now. Right now there is no old age or death because old age and death are descriptions of things as they are now when we compare them to things as they used to be. ~ Brad Warner

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you. ~ Marilyn Monroe

In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it's with someone you care for. ~ Patricia Nell Warren

He said I was bein hard on myself. Said it was a sign of old age. Tryin to set things right. I guess there's some truth to that. But it aint the whole truth. I agreed with him that there wasnt a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it dont last long. I waited for him to smile but he didn't. I said well, that's pretty cold. And he said it was no colder than what the facts called for. So that was all there was about that. ~ Cormac McCarthy

He was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what happened took a poetic turn. 'I had come to the time in my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented gods and prayed to them,' he said. 'I did not say my prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same gods. I have a notion that she came to the office because she thought the gods would be there but she was happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was an experience that cannot be explained, although I suppose it is always happening to men and women in all sorts of places. ~ Sherwood Anderson

There is no such thing as the old age of the wise. ~ Sophocles

When serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage -
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age
when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
- and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close
when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn - valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude - and march
denounces april as a saboteur
then we'll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind (and not until) ~ E. E. Cummings

I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are old. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I am a fading phantasmagoria. Time has left me in partial glory. ~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

Everybody had been in their twenties then; well, round about thirty. Now, from round about seventy, all those years of maturity or the prime of life or whatever you called it looked like an interval between two bouts of vomiting. ~ Kingsley Amis

I agree with Pierre Bayle and with Unamuno that when cold reason contemplates the world it finds not only an absence of God, but good reasons for supposing that there is no God at all. From this perspective, from what Unamuno called the 'tragic sense of life', from this despair, faith comes to the rescue, not only as something nonrational but in a sense irrational. For Unamuno the great symbol of a person of faith was his Spanish hero Don Quixote. Faith is indeed quixotic. It is absurd. Let us admit it. Let us concede to everything! To a rational mind the world looks like a world without God. It looks like a world with no hope for another life. To think otherwise, to believe in spite of appearances, is surely a kind of madness. The atheist sees clearly that windmills are in fact only windmills, that Dulcinea is just a poor country bumpkin with a homely face and an unpleasant smell. The atheist is a Sarah, justifiably laughing in her old age at Abraham's belief that God will give them a son.

What can be said in reply? How can a fideist admit that faith is a kind of madness, a dream fed by passionate desire, and yet maintain that one is not mad to make the leap? ~ Martin Gardner

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin