Are you thankful for not being young?''Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don't you see?...
— Our Mutual Friend
Quotes About Aging
On an evening walk you catch your reflection in a darkened window and pause. The face is familiar, though a decade has changed it. The hair has thinned, the lines have deepened, and you feel like a stranger meeting an old acquaintance. Aging works this way: small changes that slowly make a different person.
Benjamin Franklin saw the comedy in it, noting that everyone wishes for a long life but nobody wants to actually be old. Thomas Edison said he was long on ideas but short on time, and expected to live only about a hundred years. Victor Hugo drew a line in the middle, calling forty the old age of youth and fifty the youth of old age. George Orwell went further, claiming that by fifty everyone has the face they deserve, as if our habits and choices etch themselves into their skin.
Benjamin Franklin saw the comedy in it, noting that everyone wishes for a long life but nobody wants to actually be old. Thomas Edison said he was long on ideas but short on time, and expected to live only about a hundred years. Victor Hugo drew a line in the middle, calling forty the old age of youth and fifty the youth of old age. George Orwell went further, claiming that by fifty everyone has the face they deserve, as if our habits and choices etch themselves into their skin.
The amount of women you hear say, "If Donald—or Arthur—or whatever his name was—had only lived." And I sometimes think but if he had, he'd have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not.
— Murder in Mesopotamia
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
— The Waste Land and Other Poems
...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.
— One Hundred Years of Solitude
LADY BRACKNELLThirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.
— The Importance of Being Earnest
All things left her, all / But one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end, Beyond the rapture and its eclipse, In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.
— Dreamtigers
Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
Forty is the old age of youth fifty is the youth of old age.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.
All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.
All would live long but none would be old.
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child's and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots.
— On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Dignity high station or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men in order to keep the younger at a distance who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.
Old age is by nature rather talkative.
Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.
— The Waves
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
There's no such thing is aging, but maturing and knowledge. It's beautiful, I call that beauty.
No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
— A Farewell to Arms
I am ashes where once I was fire...
— Selected Poems
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.