Quotations 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 an issue of mind over matter.  If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.  ~Mark Twain


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, New York Times, 9 October 1960


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


A man's age is something impressive, it sums up his life:  maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves.  A man's age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wartime Writings 1939-1944, translated from French by Norah Purcell


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


Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour.  With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.  ~Charles Dickens


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.  ~Author 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


Grow old with me!  The best is yet to be.  ~Robert Browning


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, Flight to Arras, 1942, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


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, Morituri Salutamus


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


Does age poison us, or do we poison age?  ~Astrid Alauda


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, news summaries, 9 March 1954


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 colours 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


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


None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.  ~Henry David Thoreau


I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.  ~Dave Barry


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


Age swallows our childhood.  ~Jareb Teague


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


The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


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, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950


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.  ~Author 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 (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935


At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgment.  ~Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac


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, More in Anger, 1958


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


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.  ~Author Unknown


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, about golf's Senior Tour


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


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


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


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, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


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.  ~Fran?ois 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


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 a prison from which we cannot escape.  ~Morrow Bourne


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


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


Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


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.  ~Author Unknown


Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, diseases seek men.  ~Chinese Proverb


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


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


Age attacks when we least expect it.  ~Carrie Latet


Old age ain't no place for sissies.  ~Bette Davis


The last birthday that's any good is 23.  ~Andy Rooney


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


Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.  ~Edward Young, Night Thoughts


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 Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


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


It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live?  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.  ~Jennifer Yane


Middle age is when we can do just as much as ever - but would rather not.  ~Author Unknown

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber.  So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage - so long are you young.  When the wires are all down and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old.  ~Douglas MacArthur


Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear;
'Tis but the funeral of the former year.
~Alexander Pope


To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.  ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891


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


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


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


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


The number one factor in aging is burdens.  Your burdens, or how you carry them, make you old.  ~Scarlett Bene


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


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, "Your Disintegrating Body," Dave Barry Turns 40, 1990


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.  ~Author 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


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


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


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


You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather.  Later he played my father and finally he played my husband.  If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother.  That's the way it is in Hollywood.  The men get younger and the women get older.  ~Lillian Gish


Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.  ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711


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


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


Adulthood is when the ghosts of childhood appear.  ~Holden Rinehart


When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.  ~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711


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


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


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.  ~Quoted by 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


Our bodies are the burial grounds of dead time.  ~T.A. Sachs, to "Time! where didst thou those years inter, Which I have seene decease?" by William Habington


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, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


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


Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve.  Middle age is when you're 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


At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive.  At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing and assertive.  At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive.  Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?  ~Jules Feiffer


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