Thursday 1 March 2018

Age

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 Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. 
-2 Corinthians 4:16

 Forty is the old age of youth; fifty, the youth of old age. 
-Victor Hugo.

• The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
-Hervey Allen

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.
-Benjamin Disraeli


• We are all American at puberty; we die French. 
-Evelyn Waugh 

• At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
- Virginia Woolf

• My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
- Peggy Noonan

• Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.
― Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow



• Venus, take my votive glass;
Since I am not what I was,
What from this day I shall be,
Venus, let me never see.
-Matthew Prior, 
The Lady who offers her Looking-Glass to Venus


• Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

- George Eliot

• Innocence in a man of forty is no longer innocence but stupidity. 

-Cyril Connolly, talking about Guy Crouchback in Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy

• You know you are middle-aged when the telephone goes and you hope it's not for you. 
I have no idea who said this and it dates from before mobile telephones.


• I won't interview anyone under the age of thirty.
-Ruby Wax 

• We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.
-May L. Becker

• To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
-Samuel Beckett

• You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older.
-Anouk Aimee

• A woman's always younger than a man at equal years.
- Mrs. Barrett Browning

• Grow old with me the best is yet to come.
-Robert Browning

• It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow old in my own esteem --and in my esteem age is not estimable.
-Lord Byron

• Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is -- I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at -- a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.
- Lord Byron

• A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
- Joyce Carey

• It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.
- Emily Carr

• Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives.
- Maurice Chevalier

• There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:
1. That dear old soul;
2. That old woman;
3. That old witch.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
- Mortimer Collins

• The excess of our youth are cheques written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later. 
-Charles Caleb Colton

• I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
- Wendy Cope

• At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.
- Clarence Darrow

• At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths --your abilities and your failings.
- Gerard Depardieu

• Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.

-Edward Young

• I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.
- Camille Desmoulins

• When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.
-Sir John Mortimer


• It is not how old you are, but how you are old.
- Marie Dressler

• Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
- Lawrence Durrell

• Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
- William Feather

• One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young. -Dorothy Canfield Fisher

• Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
- Benjamin Franklin

• I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.
- Peter Gabriel

• You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
- John Greier

• A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
- Corra May Harris

• Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.
- Benjamin Haydon

• Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep. -Alexander Herzen

• Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
- Edward Hoagland

• Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
- Washington Irving

• At last now you can be what the old cannot recall and the young long for in dreams, yet still include them all. -Elizabeth Jennings

• When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
- Samuel Johnson

• From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
- Carl Jung

• Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
- Garson Kanin

• For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
- KäThe Kollwitz

• Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week. -Maggie Kuhn

• Few people know how to be old.
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld

• Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.
- Philip Larkin

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

• When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.
- Prue Leith

• I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.
- Rush Limbaugh

• Like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.
- Lin Yü-tang

• 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

• If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
- Margaret Mead

• How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

•You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
- John Nuveen

• Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
- Sir William Osler

• One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.
- Harry A. Overstreet

• Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
- Anthony Powell

• One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
-J. B. Priestley

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

• A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.
- Sir Richard Steele

•Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
- Jonathan Swift

• None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm
-Henry David Thoreau

• Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
- Mark Twain

• You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
- Fay Weldon

• The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
- Arthur Schopenhauer


3 comments:

  1. “Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.”
    ― Yogi Berra

    ReplyDelete
  2. Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
    Oliver Wendell Holmes

    ReplyDelete
  3. 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

    ReplyDelete