OLD AGE QUOTES IV

quotations about old age

Old Age quote

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Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.

FRANCIS BACON
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"Of Regiment Of Health", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral


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Tags: Francis Bacon


When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997


To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent -- that is to triumph over old age.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Ponkapog Papers

Tags: Thomas Bailey Aldrich


Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

The Virginians

Tags: William Makepeace Thackeray


Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims

Tags: Abraham Miller


Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.

TRACY LETTS

August: Osage Country

Tags: Tracy Letts


We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where were we... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones ...

GRAMPA SIMPSON

"Last Exit to Springfield", The Simpsons


In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Getting older was definitely preferable to an up close and personal meeting with the Grim Reaper.

JOANN ROSS

No Safe Place

Tags: Joann Ross


Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

DORIS LESSING

interview, The Progressive, June 1999

Tags: Doris Lessing


The real affliction of old age is remorse.

CESARE PAVESE

The Moon and the Bonfire

Tags: Cesare Pavese


Man, like the fruit he eats, has his period of ripeness. Like that, too, if he continues longer hanging to the stem, it is but an useless and unsightly appendage.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

letter to Henry Dearborn, August 17, 1821

Tags: Thomas Jefferson


Old age makes you a stranger in your own country.

KEN ALSTAD

Savvy Sayin's

Tags: Ken Alstad


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

Time Magazine, October 23, 1950

Tags: T. S. Eliot


Age is never so old as youth would measure it.

JACK LONDON

"The Wit of Porportuk"

Tags: Jack London


Society often sends the message that old age is just a waiting room for the end--either elderly people are weak, sick, and irrelevant or that old age is all about meaningless recreation.

ANDREA BRANDT

"4 Keys to Increase Your Happiness As You Get Older", Psychology Today, February 1, 2017


So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

"Broken Music"

Tags: Thomas Bailey Aldrich


It would be a good appendix to the Art of Living and Dying, if any one would write the Art of Growing Old, and teach men to resign their pretensions to the pleasures and gallantries of youth, in proportion to the alteration they find in themselves by the approach of age and infirmities. The infirmities of this stage of life would be much fewer, if we did not affect those which attend the more vigorous and active part of our days; but, instead of studying to be wiser, or being contented with our present follies, the ambition of many of us is also to be the same sort of fools we formerly have been.

JOSEPH ADDISON

The Tatler, December 21, 1710

Tags: Joseph Addison


There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect.

GLEN DUNCAN

The Last Werewolf

Tags: Glen Duncan


I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

The Paris Review, summer 1993

Tags: Fran Lebowitz