Wise Old Man Quotes

A wise old man taught me that diplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power. Persuasion, not force, works best and lasts longest. ~ Robin Hobb

I've always said that at the end of the day, on a legal issue, I think a wise old woman and a wise old man are going to reach the same conclusion. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

The perilous time for the most highly gifted is not youth. The holy sensibilities of genius - for all the sensibilities of genius are holy - keep their possessor essentially unhurt as long as animal spirits and the idea of being young last; but the perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth; when the world comes to them, not with the song of the siren, against which all books warn us, but as a wise old man counselling acquiescence in what is below them. ~ Elizabeth P. Peabody

Plato and his disciples approach,' announced irreverent Teddy, as Mr. March came in with several young men and women about him; for the wise old man was universally beloved, and ministered so beautifully to his flock that many of them thanked him all their lives for the help given to both hearts and souls. ~ Louisa May Alcott

You asked why the rate hate Overlanders so deeply. It is because they know one will be the warrior of the prophecy," said Vikus.
"Oh, I see," said Gregor. "So, when's he coming?"
Vikus fixed his eyes on Gregor. "I believe he is already here. ~ Suzanne Collins

Paraphrasing: An old man claimed to be a psychic. The boy devised a plan to capture a bird, and ask the old man if the bird in his hands was dead or alive. Then he would crush it or let the bird fly, either way proving the man a fraud. So he said, "Tell me old man, is the bird alive or dead?" The wise old man looked at the boy and said, "The bird is as you choose it to be. ~ Michael Hyatt

If we cannot leave something tangible behind - such as a gene or a poem - perhaps it is enough if we just make the world a little better? You can help somebody, and that somebody will subsequently help somebody else, and you thereby contribute to the overall improvement of the world, and constitute a small link in the great chain of kindness. Though it has its merits, the great chain of happiness is a bit like the great chain of turtles - it is far from clear where its meaning comes from. A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. 'Well,' he answered, 'I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven't figured out is why the other people are here. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

The truth is, part of me is every age. I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old. I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like. I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. ~ Mitch Albom

Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song. ~ Lord Dunsany

I'll keep waiting because I'm a young man. I'm not as old as they think. ~ Sergio Martinez

The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America ... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Haven't you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived 'at the turn of the century,' or 'when life was simpler,' or 'worth living,' or 'when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,' or simply 'in the good old days.' People didn't talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now.

For the first time in man's history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape - to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets - escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens - when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest - my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to ~ Jack Finney

When alone in a dark forest waiting for an audience with an evil god, the most prudent course of action is to be quiet and wait. 'Prudent' wasn't one of my favourite words.
"Hello? I've come to borrow a cup of sugar. Anybody? Perhaps there is an old woman with a house made of candy who could help me?"
"Marrying for love isn't wise."
The voice came from somewhere to the left. Melodious, but not soft, definitely female and charged with a promise of hidden power. Something told me that hearing her scream would end very badly for me.
I stopped and pivoted toward the voice.
"Marry for safety. Marry for power. But only fools marry for love."
When a strange voice talks to you in the black woods, only idiots answer.
I was that idiot. "Thank you, counsellor. How much do I owe you for this session? ~ Ilona Andrews

There once was an old man of Lyme who married three wives at a time when asked, 'Why a third?' he replied 'One's absurd! and bigamy, sir, is a crime!' ~ William Cosmo Monkhouse

Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain. ~ Kabir

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. ~ Salman Rushdie

Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on. ~ Alfred Korzybski

No one died from infection under Keen ... He (Keen) began to chronicle the results in statistical articles. He was threatened with expulsion from the Pennsylvania Medical Association ... This was in the 1890's ... Finally was accepted as the greatest surgeon in the US. The old man told me - and he started to cry ... 'I nearly went under. I was nearly shut off. ~ Paul Douglas

You man that tiller day and night. Won't you rest?'
Ereko lightly laughed the suggestion aside. 'No, lad. I am so old now that sleeping and waking have melded together into one and I know not which I inhabit.'
Watching the lad struggle through that, Ereko shifted course slightly to avoid a looming ice-spire.
'Truly? So old? As old as the mountains?'
Ereko raised his brows. 'Goodness, no. Not that old. Only half so old, I should think. ~ Ian C. Esslemont

I used to love history class. I can still quote whole passages by heart: "When the emperor entered the Hall of Balming Virtue, a violent wind came from a dark corner, and out of it slithered a giant serpent that coiled around the throne. The emperor fainted, and that night earthquakes struck Loyang, and waves swept the shores, and cranes shrieked in the marshes. On the fifth day of the sixth moon a long trail of black mist floated into the Hall of Concubines, and hot and cold became confused, and a hen turned into a rooster, and a woman turned into a man, and flesh fell from the skies." Now, that is grand stuff, just the thing to give to growing boys, and then we were old enough to read the greatest of all historians. This is what Ssu-ma Ch'ien had to say about the exact same subject: "The Chou Dynasty was nearing collapse." Bah. ~ Barry Hughart

Look, why don't you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?" He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man ~ Douglas Adams

Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played tricks on me enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can;t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a-laying up sin and suffering for the both of us, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart almost breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hooky this evening, and I'll just be obleeged to make him work tomorrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've got to do some of my duty by him, or I'll be the ruination of the child. ~ Mark Twain

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn't any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you're taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn't matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you'd like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn't even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and yo ~ Kevin Powers

What more she said, or what de Crucis answered, he could never afterward recall. He had a confused sense of having cried out a last unavailing protest, faintly, inarticulately, like a man struggling to make himself heard in a dream; then the room grew dark about him, and in its stead he saw the old chapel at Donnaz, with its dimly-gleaming shrine, and heard the voice of the chaplain, harsh and yet strangely shaken: - "My chief prayer for you is that, should you be raised to this eminence, it may be at a moment when such advancement seems to thrust you in the dust." Odo lifted his head and saw de Crucis standing alone before him. "I am ready," he said. ~ Edith Wharton

In the winter of 1987 India was full of iskeems that had gone awry. Agricultural iskeems, political iskeems, economic iskeems, educational iskeems, stop black money iskeems, attract white tourists iskeems, drinkable water iskeems, animal protection iskeems, women's welfare iskeems, nurture children iskeems, don't scan female foetus iskeems, privatization iskeems, medical iskeems, entertainment iskeems, old India iskeems and new India iskeems.
We had mastered the art of nomenclature from the white man.
Grand labels could disguise unforgivable things. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another.
After the 6th candy bar a man on the bench across from him said Son you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne rot your teeth and make you fat.
Little Tony replied My grandfather lived to be 107 years old.
The man asked Did you grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time
Little Tony answered No he minded his own fucking business. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky. ~ Victor Hugo

-- They must go on, said Msimangu gravely. You cannot stop the world from going on. My friend, I am a Christian. It is not in my heart to hate a white man. It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness. But you will pardon me if I talk frankly to you. The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief -- and again I ask your pardon -- that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten.
He passed his hand across his brown.
-- It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely. But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours, and I must speak it, for it is the truth for me. They are not all so. There are some white men who give their lives to build up what is broken.
--But they are not enough, he said. They are afraid, this is the truth. It is fear that rules this land. ~ Alan Paton

Sometimes, you'll watch the news and you'll see two-year-old boys in South Africa, wearing 'Spider-Man' t-shirts. It's such a global phenomenon. ~ James Vanderbilt

It is bad for a young man to sin; but it is worse for an old man to sin. ~ Abu Bakr

The old man heard the music of the imperialists issuing from the golden hotel, heavy with the gaiety of despair... ~ Salman Rushdie

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now than
the Pyramids. ~ H.G.Wells

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either. ~ Marilynne Robinson

no man with any sense should marry the girl to whom he loses his virginity. It's like learning to drive in some clapped-out old banger and then holding on to it for the rest of your life when you've developed the skill to handle a BMW in rush-hour traffic on a busy Autobahn. ~ John Boyne

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly begin to grow cold. You may be insecure, inadequate, mistaken or potbellied. Death, panic, depression, and disillusionment may be near you. But you are not just that. You are accepted.' Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted. ~ Brennan Manning

Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do. ~ George MacDonald

As an old man ... looking back on one's life, it's one of the things that strikes you most forcibly-that the only thing that's taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life's about ... is suffering, affliction. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Katie leaned forward conspiratorially. Oh, sweetie, I just said that because Alice is an old bag. You go after Devon. The man is fine. I don't blame you for changing your look for a shot at that. When the pool about you two gets going at Petie's Pub, I'm putting my money on you. ~ Susan Meier

Whether the type of old sea captain that I have portrayed in my stories is gone forever, is a question. Certainly each summer I find that the ranks have perceptibly thinned. The longshore captain is still there, many of the men who are not any older than myself, but their viewpoint is not that of a man who sailed his square rigged ship out one morning with China as his destination. ~ Joseph C. Lincoln

It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that. ~ Gene Hackman

In other words, the man at the ticket office had personally had intimate social and commercial progress with more nitwits, dowagers, traveling salesmen, conventioneers, old fogies, and outright jackasses than the entire population of the City of Brotherly Love. I ~ Joe Queenan

Had been of the opinion that the whole karaoke evening was going to be an utter bust; but then the little old man had sashayed into the room, walked past the table of several blonde women with the fresh sunburns and smiles of tourists, who were sitting by the little makeshift stage in the corner. He had tipped his hat to them, for he wore a hat, a spotless green fedora, and lemon-yellow gloves, and then he walked over to their table. They giggled. "Are you enjoyin' yourselves, ladies?" he asked. They continued to giggle and ~ Neil Gaiman

No-one will ever have golf under his thumb. No round ever will be so good it could not have been better. Perhaps this is why golf is the greatest of games. You are not playing a human adversary; you a playing a game. You are playing old man par. ~ Bobby Jones

Now, tell me, my dear, I said, what are you crying about?
About the years that are gone, Mr. Betteredge," says Rosanna quietly. My past life still comes back to me sometimes.
Come, come, my girl, I said, your past life is all sponged out. Why can't you forget it?
"She took me by one of the lappets of my coat. I am a slovenly old man, and a good deal of my meat and drink gets splashed about on my clothes. Sometimes one of the women, and sometimes another, cleans me of my grease. The day before, Roseanna had taken out a spot for me on the lappet of my coat, with a new composition, warranted to remove anything. The grease was gone, but there was a little dull place left on the nap of the cloth where the grease had been. The girl pointed to that place, and shook here head.
The stain is taken off, she said. But the place shows, Mr. Betteredge
the place shows! ~ Wilkie Collins

We are now told, indeed, by the learned doctors of the nullification school, that color operates as a forfeiture of the rights of human nature; that a dark skin turns a man into a chattel; that crispy hair transforms a human being into a four-footed beast. The master-priest informs you, that slavery is consecrated and sanctified by the Holy Scriptures and of the old and new Testament ... My countrymen! These are the tenants of the modern nullification school. Can you wonder that they shrink from the light of free discussion? That they skulk from the grasp of freedom and truth? ~ John Quincy Adams

Old, is it?" the man asks.
"Yes, very."
"Pre-war, is it?"
"Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion. ~ Garrett Carr

Where have the years gone, Ruby Rose? Sometimes I have to stop and think about how old I am. When I wake up in the morning, before I move this tired old body or look in the blasted mirror, I swear I'm still a young man. It just feels like yesterday. I don't know how it's gone so fast. ~ Lea Davey

I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. ~ Wendell Berry

My dad called the cops and told them I stole his car."
I roll my eyes. "Your old man put you in this hellhole? On purpose?"
"He thought it would teach me a lesson."
"Yeah," I say. "The lesson is that your old man's an asshole." The dad should have taught his son how to dress better instead.
"My mom'll bail me out."
"You sure?"
White Guy straightens. "She's a lawyer, and my dad's done this before. A few times. I think to piss off my mom and get her attention. They're divorced."
I shake my head. White people. ~ Simone Elkeles

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey aro ~ George Whitman