Age

Quotes about Age

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

~Doug Larson

Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

~Leroy "Satchel" Paige

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

~Samuel Ullman

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. ~Douglas MacArthur

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional. ~Chili Davis

In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long. ~Nikita Ivanovich Panin

Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.

~Jim Fiebig

In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.

~E.B. White

The years teach much which the days never knew. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.

~Sam Ewing

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

~Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

~George Bernard Shaw

There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

~John Mortimer

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

~Maurice Chevalier

Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!.... his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his hands are mutes.

~Charles Dickens

Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.

~Author Unknown

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.

~Robert Southey, The Doctor

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

~John Barrymore

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?

~Satchel Paige

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

~Muriel Spark

The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.

~Jerry M. Wright

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. ~Mark Twain

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

~Bob Hope

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.

~Caryn Leschen

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.

~Victor Hugo

Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush to the net. ~Franklin Adams

Everyone is the age of their heart.

~Guatemalan Proverb

There is always a lot to be thankful for, if you take the time to look. For example, I'm sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don't hurt.

~ Unknown

Youth is a disease from which we all recover. ~Dorothy Fulheim

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age — I missed it coming and going.

~J.B. Priestly

I still have a full deck; I just shuffle slower now. ~Author Unknown

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

~Tom Stoppard

By the time I have money to burn, my fire will have burnt out.

~Author Unknown

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

~Logan Pearsall Smith

We are young only once, after that we need some other excuse.

~Author Unknown

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.

~Judith Regan

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

~Mark Twain

It's sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.

~Brigitte Bardot

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.

~Herbert Asquith

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

~Voltaire

There's no such thing as too late. That's why they invented death.

~From the movie Out to Sea

I was wrong to grow older. Pity. I was so happy as a child.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Age is opportunity no less,

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away,

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes (Thanks Janice!)

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made.

~Edmund Waller

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

~Doris Lessing

There is still no cure for the common birthday.

~John Glenn

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty — they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.

~Martin Buxbaum

An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have: the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.

~Agatha Christie

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.

~G. Norman Collie

You can't hide your true colors as you approach the autumn of your life.

~Author Unknown

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

~T.S. Eliot

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's important to have a twinkle in your wrinkle. ~Author Unknown

There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you.

~Carol Grace

When I can look Life in the eyes,

Grown calm and very coldly wise,

Life will have given me the Truth,

And taken in exchange — my youth.

~Sara Teasdale

Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.

~Robert Brault

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

~Henry David Thoreau

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

~Quoted by Francis Bacon, Apothegm

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.

~Henri Amiel

We've put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.

~Frank A. Clark

First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.

~Leo Rosenberg

It is possible at any age to discover a lifelong desire you never knew you had.

~Robert Brault

When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.

~Marty Bucella

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

~Saint Aurelius Augustine

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

~T.S. Eliot

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs. ~Charles Dickens

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.

~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

You know you've reached middle age when a doctor, not a policeman, tells you to slow down, all you exercise are your prerogatives and it takes you longer to rest than to get tired.

~ Unknown

We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.

~Charles Lamb

It is autumn; not without

But within me is the cold.

Youth and spring are all about;

It is I that have grown old.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Autumn Within"

Life is one long process of getting tired.

~Samuel Butler, Notebooks

Don't worry about avoiding temptation — as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.

~Author Unknown

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.

~Leon Trotsky

At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgment.

~Benjamin Franklin

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.

~Marya Mannes

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

~John Fischer

Everything slows down with age, except the time it takes cake and ice cream to reach your hips. ~Attributed to John Wagner

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time. ~Oliver W. Holmes, Sr.

Old Time, who changes all below,

To wean men gently for the grave.

~Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed. ~Henry David Thoreau

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

~Graham Greene

When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part. ~Laurence Olivier

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.

~Erma Bombeck

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

~Ogden Nash

They say that age is all in your mind. The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body. ~Author Unknown

The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life. "Why," I answered without a thought, "now."

~David Grayson

Like a lot of fellows around here, I have a furniture problem. My chest has fallen into my drawers.

~Billy Casper

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

~Truman Capote

Never use the passing years as an excuse for old age. ~Robert Brault

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician. ~Unknown

I spent my 30s fixing everything I broke in my 20s. ~Eddie Murphy

A man is not old as long as he is seeking something. ~Jean Rostand

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

~Madeleine L'Engle

You're never too old. Unfortunately, you're always too young to know it.

~Robert Brault

Youth disserves; middle age conserves; old age preserves.

~Martin H. Fischer

One of the best parts of growing older? You can flirt all you like since you've become harmless.

~Liz Smith

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

~Mignon McLaughlin

We turn not older with years, but newer every day. ~Emily Dickinson

In a dream you are never eighty.

~Anne Sexton

Old men are fond of giving good advice, to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.

~François La Rochefoucauld

Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind begin to change places.

~Author Unknown

Middle age is youth without its levity, and age without decay.

~Daniel Defoe

There must be a day or two in a man's life when he is the precise age for something important.

~Franklin P. Adams

Where did the time go? Yesterday, I was a girl, and today, I suddenly find myself in the autumn of my years with the cold winds of winter breathing down my neck.

~Peggy Toney Horton

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

~Allen

I don't do alcohol anymore — I get the same effect just standing up fast.

~Author Unknown

Men at forty

Learn to close softly

The doors to rooms they will not be

Coming back to.

~Donald Justice, "Men at Forty"

Age is just a number. Mine is unlisted.

~Unknown

Age is a prison from which we cannot escape

but only by death,

into another world.

~Morrow Bourne

I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past.

~Robert Brault

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever. ~Don Marquis

My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five.

~Samuel Johnson

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

~William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

I'm not 40, I'm eighteen with 22 years experience. ~Author Unknown

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day,

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by-and-by black night doth take away...

~William Shakespeare

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear. ~Mignon McLaughlin

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

~H.L. Mencken

Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.

~ Unknown

Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, diseases seek men.

~Chinese Proverb

I look back on the time I've wasted, and I'm just glad I wasted it while I still had the chance.

 ~Robert Brault

Ev'ry season hath its pleasures:

Spring may boast her flow'ry prime,

Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures

Brighten autumn's sob'rer time.

So life's year begins and closes;

Days, though short'ning, still can shine;

What, though youth gave loves and roses,

Age still leaves us friends and wine....

Thus may we, as years are flying,

To their flight our pleasures suit,

Nor regret the blossoms dying,

While we still can taste the fruit.

~Thomas Moore, "Spring and Autumn"

Young twigs will bend but not old trees.

~Dutch Proverb

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks.

~Jean Rhys

The brain forgets much, but the lower back remembers everything.

~Robert Braul

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

~Tom Wilson

We are always the same age inside.

 ~Gertrude Stein

Old age ain't no place for sissies.

~Bette Davis

The last birthday that's any good is 23.

~Andy Rooney

At my age, you not only have bittersweet memories, you make bittersweet plans.

~Robert Brault

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that'll get you home earlier.

~Dan Bennett

I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death.

~William Allen White

Wrinkled was not one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up.

~Author Unknown

Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

 ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts

My younger passions are still listening, as I age. ~Terri Guillemets

Don't let aging get you down. It's too hard to get back up.

~Attributed to John Wagner

As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks, but not our appetite for it.

~Mignon McLaughlin

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

 ~Arthur Schopenhauer

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M.D. after them.

~Arnold Palmer

You spend 90% of your adult life hoping for a long rest and the last 10% trying to convince the Lord that you're actually not that tired.

~Robert Brault

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live?

~Mignon McLaughlin

They're not gray hairs. They're wisdom highlights. ~Author Unknown

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.

~Jennifer Yane

I am now old enough to no longer have a fear of dying young.

 ~Bruce Ades

Middle age is when we can do just as much as ever — but would rather not.

~Author Unknown

Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear;

'Tis but the funeral of the former year.

~Alexander Pope

The sun shines different ways in summer and winter. We shine different ways in the seasons of our lives. ~Terri Guillemets

No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one Autumnal face....

~John Donne

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

~Oscar Wilde

Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.

 ~Ambrose Bierce

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

~Zora Neale Hurston

I admire and respect those unique and positive individuals who can "age without aging." The number of times a heart beats is not as important as its tempo and rhythm.

~Craig D. Slovak

The elderly don't drive that badly; they're just the only ones with time to do the speed limit.

~Jason Love

Age attacks when we least expect it.

~Terri Guillemets

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game.

~Vin Scully

It seems no more than right that men should seize time by the forelock, for the rude old fellow, sooner or later, pulls all their hair out.

~George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana, 1860

At another year

I would not boggle

Except that when I jog

I joggle.

~Ogden Nash, "Birthday on the Beach"

All diseases run into one, old age. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.

 ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Does age poison us, or do we poison age?

~Terri Guillemets

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

~Li Po

In dog years, I'm dead.

~Author Unknown

Middle age: The time when you'll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.

~Robert Quillen

If youth but know,

And old age only could.

~Henri Estienne

Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces.

~Michel de Montaigne

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

~Mark Twain

The arctic loneliness of age.

~S. Weir Mitchell

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.

~Dave Barry

And now,

Though haply mellow'd by correcting time,

I thank thee, Heaven! that the bereaving world

Hath not diminish'd the subliming hopes

Of youth, in manhood's more imposing cares...

~Robert Montgomery, "Death," A Universal Prayer; Death; A Vision of Heaven; and A Vision of Hell; &c. &c., 1829

The true way to render age vigorous is to prolong the youth of the mind.

~Mortimer Collins

A man is as old as he's feeling,

A woman as old as she looks.

~Mortimer Collins

When the problem is not so much resisting temptation as finding it, you may just be getting older.

~ Unknown

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.

~Henry Ford

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

~Jawaharlal Nehru

Sometimes age succeeds, sometimes it fails. It depends on you.

~Ravensara Noite

An old woman looks in a mirror, recalls a little girl with a rag doll, and wonders what became of the little girl.

~Robert Brault

The best thing about getting old is that all those things you couldn't have when you were young you no longer want.

~L.S. McCandless

I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.

~Bernard Berenson

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.

~Author Unknown

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.

~Wilma Rudolph

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

~Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups.

~Margaret Atwood

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

~P.G. Wodehouse

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it goes.

~Unknown

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.

~Harold Coffin

Old age is a lot of crossed off names in an address book.

~Ronald Blythe

My wrinkles are a playground of happy memories. ~Terri Guillemets

You spend the first two-thirds of your life asking to be left alone and the last third not having to ask. ~Robert Brault

It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was.

~Seigneur de Saint-Evremond, 1696

Age is like the newest version of a software — it has a bunch of great new features but you lost all the cool features the original version had.

~Carrie Latet

Age swallows our childhood.

~Terri Guillemets

When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.

~Hugo L. Black

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

You get to an age when there are really just two reasons to get up in the morning — for goodness sake and for heaven's sake.

~Robert Brault

When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings. ~Jonathan Swift

They talk about the economy this year. Hey, my hairline is in recession, my waistline is in inflation. Altogether, I'm in a depression.

~Rick Majerus

Few people know how to be old.

~Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

We are only young once. That is all society can stand. ~Bob Bowen

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age. ~Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left. It is called hunting for your spectacles. ~Edward Grey

The lost leaves measure our years; they are gone as the days are gone.

~Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields, 1908

Regular naps prevent old age, especially if you take them while driving

~Author Unknown

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

~William Butler Yeats

I don't know how you feel about old age... but in my case I didn't even see it coming. It hit me from the rear. ~Phyllis Diller

Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.

~Andre Maurois

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.

 ~Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby

You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.

 ~George Burns

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

 ~Voltaire

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

 ~Bonnie Prudden

The trick is growing up without growing old.

~Casey Stengel

It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.

~Raymond A. Michel in The Leaf

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis.

~Leon Edel

The older you get the stronger the wind gets — and it's always in your face.

~Jack Nicklaus

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

~Timothy Leary

It takes a long time to become young.

~Pablo Picasso

The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer.

~Joan Collins

I never dared be radical when young

For fear it would make me conservative when old.

~Robert Frost

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

~Logan Pearsall Smith

Middle age is when your classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.

~Bennett Cerf

I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little. ~Sheila Kaye-Smith

There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone; but years after, we know it was much later.

~Mignon McLaughlin

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age. ~Victor Hugo

Youth is when you are allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you are forced to. ~Bill Vaughn

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. ~Kurt Vonnegut

Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much.

~Margaret Willour

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

~Ashley Montagu