Older Adults Quotes

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

About 20 percent of older adults who break a hip die within a year. ~ John J. Ratey

Why are young adults so self-centered and always seeking instant gratification? Because older adults, often in positions of power, paint them that way. ~ Raymond Arroyo

William James, the father of research psychology in the United States, said "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter. We disengage with interpersonal conflict, choosing to let it be, especially when those in our network are involved. ~ Meg Jay

I haven't taught creative writing all that much (my CW teaching consists of a few summer workshops for elementary school children and an eight-week class for older adults), and I don't really know what my teaching style is yet. ~ Mary J. Miller

Conscientiousness

Not every anxious person is conscientious, but because you're reading a CBT-based self-help book, there's a good chance you're at least moderately high in conscientiousness - a personality trait associated with having a strong work ethic and a thorough, orderly approach to tasks. People high in conscientiousness often get particularly great results from learning cognitive behavioral principles and skills. Why? They tend to like the systematic nature of a cognitive behavioral approach. They do well because they work hard to understand themselves and are diligent in applying their learning to their lives. Anxious people sometimes underestimate how conscientious they are, so make sure you give yourself enough credit for your conscientiousness.
It's important to understand that conscientiousness is not the same thing as perfectionism. For example, perfectionists might spend so long trying to make something "just right" that they don't have any willpower left over for other important tasks. Perfectionism and conscientiousness tend to be associated with opposite outcomes. For example, in a study of older adults, perfectionism was associated with an increased risk or mortality. Conscientiousness was associated with a decreased risk. There are big advantages to reducing perfectionism but retaining your conscientiousness! ~ Alice Boyes

We're proud of the work we're doing to make Chicago a great city for people of all ages. Nothing's more important than keeping in mind the needs of older adults - and how valuable a role they play in improving the city, based on their amazing collective talent and wisdom. ~ Rahm Emanuel

Pneumococcus is a fairly common cause of pneumonia and [raises the] risk of death in older adults. ~ Paul A. Offit

With the 'Old Kingdom' trilogy, at least half the readers were older adults rather than younger adults. I wrote them for myself with no particular audience in mind. ~ Garth Nix

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information - the bad news - more memorable than positive information - or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala - the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: "Why did my boss say that? Why doesn't my boss like me?" Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed. ~ Meg Jay

We have other opposite problems with circadian rhythms that can happen when you - a lot of times with older adults. They start to go to bed at 6:00, 7:00 at night and they wake up at 2:00 in the morning. And they're rhythms actually shift earlier, but sometime it can just kind of miss the mark and shift too much earlier and that's when we need to treat it with bright light. ~ Shelby Harris

When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

When I get older losing my hair many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four? ~ John Lennon

It seems that in almost all societies, the attitudes that people have to language change is basically the same. People everywhere tend to say that the older form of a language is in some sense 'better' than the form that is being used today. ~ Terry Crowley

Adulthood is an attempt to become the antithesis of the wounded child within us. ~ Stewart Stafford

I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project. ~ Seymour Papert

There is a phase of melancholy - a phase that has sloughed all urgency - that seems to me always a revelation of that ancient, familiar thing, my true self. If there is anything in a person with which one may be in love, surely it can only ever be the self that such melancholy reveals. There are potent and austere traditions that teach us a true self that has no qualities, no atmosphere, and which thus could never be revealed by melancholia; some of these traditions maintain, in a tone that suggests resistance is folly, that there is no self at all. But such traditions are not native to my soul, and within my life they are new, though they are older than me in history. For me, the self revealed by melancholy is older and thus truer. ~ Quentin S. Crisp

Stendhal knows the source of his greatest happiness and his worst misery: the reflexivity of his spiritual life. When he loves, enjoys beauty, feels free and unconstrained, he realizes not only the bliss of these feelings but, at the same time, the happiness of being aware of this happiness. But now that he ought to be completely absorbed by his happiness and feel redeemed from all his limitations and inadequacies, he is still full of problems and doubts: Is that the whole story? - he asks himself. Is that what they call love? Is it possible to love, to feel, to be delighted and yet to observe oneself so coolly and so calmly? Stendhal's answer is by no means the usual one, which assumes the existence of an insurmountable gulf between feeling and reason, passion and reflexion, love and ambition, but is based on the assumption that modern man simply feels differently, is enraptured and enthusiastic differently from a contemporary of Racine or Rousseau. For them, spontaneity and reflexivity of the emotions were incompatible, for Stendhal and his heroes they are quite inseparable; none of their passions is so strong as the desire to be constantly calling themselves to account for what is going on inside them. Compared with the older literature, this self consciousness implies just as profound a change as Stendhal's realism, and the overcoming of classical-romantic psychology is just as strictly one of the preconditions of his art as the abolition of the alternative between the ro ~ Arnold Hauser

Everyone in the world ages at exactly the same rate and time. We're all getting older in unison. ~ Jarod Kintz

Edwina always enjoyed a morning ride. Some mornings she rode the horse, and some mornings she rode the groom. ~ Barbara Taylor Bradford

Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing ~ David Brooks

It seems like the older bands are bigger than ever. We get a mixed crowd where you have kids and old blokes like me. ~ Geezer Butler

Based on theoretical analysis, clinical observations, and some research findings (e.g., Kluft & Fine, 1993; Nijenhuis, Van der Hart, & Steele, 2002; Putnam, 1997; Reinders et al., 2003, submitted; Steinberg, 1995), as well as on 19th and early 20th century literature on dissociation (cf., Van der Hart & Dorahy, in press), we propose that traumatization essentially involves a degree of dissociative division of the personality that likely occurs along the lines of innate action systems of daily life and defense - what has been called structural dissociation of the personality (e.g., Nijenhuis et al., 2002; Van der Hart, Nijenhuis, Steele, & Brown, 2004). Dissociation of the personality develops when children or adults are exposed to potentially traumatizing events, and when their integrative capacity is insufficient to (fully) integrate these experiences within the confines of a relatively coherent personality. ~ Onno Van Der Hart

You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older. ~ Anouk Aimee

A wild joy follows when you realize you've been caught and are now free, when you fling open the prison door, walk outside, and gulp air and light for the first time in hours or days or weeks.
You sense who you were and what you knew before you defined things as good or bad, fat or thin, right or wrong. Before you became what you needed to be to be loved, you know the holiness of trees and water and rocks. You knew the adults were a bit mad, but you loved them anyway. You had no doubt, not one, about who you were; you had wings, and now, you have them again. ~ Geneen Roth

Are you gay, Cherie?
Me, No… I'm not anything… I-I mean I prefer not to indulge, I stammered.
"Really... how do you mean?"
Well love has been an elusive story, like a fairytale adults tell children but I have never known any of it to be true. In reality it reminds me of religion. I am not sure God is real either, if God is real why do so many innocents suffer?
Innocents suffer because it is their destiny to suffer.
What? What does that mean?" I'm annoyed.
God has nothing to do with it. We are born into this world to experience all that is not God-like, so we can then be inspired to reach for higher spiritual goals.
I have never thought of it that way before. If that is so then I must be preparing for sainthood. Am I to think that all of my suffering as a child has been to prepare me for greatness? ~ Darwun St. James

I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same. ~ Rick Riordan

Children trust adults and therefore adults trust children. ~ Meir Ezra

I tend to not speak up as much, so saying no is rather difficult for me. The biggest step of being an adult is saying, "This is what I do like. This is what I don't like." Being yourself means certain people aren't going to like that. I'm still figuring it out and taking things day by day. ~ Selena Gomez

On the whole, I prefer Christmas as an adult than I did as a child. ~ Nigella Lawson

A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn't. (356) ~ Victoria Moran

You can give me anything?" he asked.
"Anything!" Lucifer cried.
"Anything I ask for?"
"Anything you desire!"
"Can you give me love?" Ammon asked him. "Can you take away my sins? Can you give me salvation? Are you willing to die for me? Can you give me the love of my family and the love of my friends? Can you promise me anything besides what you have shown me here? Can you give me the love of my Father, or my older brother, Jehovah, the Christ? ~ Chris Stewart

We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I wouldn't call it an addiction. But the truth is, when you join a team as a new professional you encounter a system. As a young rider, older riders let you know how the business works. ~ Patrik Sinkewitz

We must, as we grow older and wiser, be able to allow all the pain to seep out of our bones and our souls so that we can start again. ~ Mary Balogh

Just relax. When I was younger, I made myself the victim of catastrophic thinking. Anything that went wrong was the end of the world. But as I've gotten older, I've learned to stop myself and say, 'Hey babe, calm down. Tomorrow there will be sun.' ~ Gabourey Sidibe

I was lucky enough to have an older brother who shared the splatter flicks with me, and I had parents who were cool and involved enough in my life to allow me to see them. I think my folks appreciated that I looked at these movies as a creative outlet ... almost like magic shows, if you will. ~ Adam Green

You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again. ~ Bonnie Prudden

Only adults weep with joy. Children don't. They haven't learned how rare moments of true happiness are. ~ Heather Lende

I used to be a pre-industrial writer: thousands of words in a spurt and then a few days off. But as I get older, I've switched to a mode best described as 'slow and steady wins the race.' Basically, I write during the same four hours every day, after breakfast and the all-important coffee, generally in the same room and wearing the same pajamas. ~ Scott Westerfeld

I'm learning with the older that I get that some feelings are just universal and that I'm not the only one who hates their hair or their life at times. ~ Brie Larson

My mother always used to say, The older you get, the better you get. Unless you're a banana. ~ Betty White

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die. ~ Siri Hustvedt