Aging Quotes

For poetry, he's past his prime,He takes an hour to find a rhyme;His fire is out, his wit decayed,His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.I'd have him throw away his pen,But there's no talking to some men.

...an old man is twice a child.

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

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youthAnd delves the parallels in beauty's brow.

I had always planned when I started directing in 1970 that after a few years I'd get tired of looking at myself on the screen and say: "Hey, let's not do that any more." But then every once in a while something pops up. I'm not saying it won't happen again but probably the odds get less as you set yourself for roles that fit your age group.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

Age childish makes, they say, but 'tis not true;We're only genuine children still in Age's season.[Ger., Das Alter macht nicht kindisch, wie man spricht,Es findet uns nur noch als wahre Kinder.]

One of the blessings of age is to learn not to part on a note of sharpness, to treasure the moments spent with those we love, and to make them whenever possible good to remember, for time is short.

Come grow old with me, for the best is yet to come!

Nature, as it grows again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy.

Don't look at me like I've gotten old or something like that.

One could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?

I didn't fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.

I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.

I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day..." JRR Tolkien, Letter # 174

The older you get, the better you realize you were.

Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable.

When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened

Most of the women in your life will outlast the men in your life. The Saturday Night Live ladies - Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Tina - and I text pictures of our kids back and forth all the time. It keeps us connected. As my nanny used to say, the older you get, the more important it is to know people that knew you when.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. -Sonnet 73

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

I was alarmed at my doctor's report: He said I was sound as a dollar.

No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman's bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.

The most important thing I can tell you about aging is this: If you really feel that you want to have an off-the-shoulder blouse and some big beads and thong sandals and a dirndl skirt and a magnolia in your hair, do it. Even if you're wrinkled.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

To me, life is like the back nine in golf. Sometimes you play better on the back nine. You may not be stronger, but hopefully you're wiser. And if you keep most of your marbles intact, you can add a note of wisdom to the coming generation.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.

In Truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my Memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young-or slender.

I grew up in front of these people, and now they are seeing me as an 'older' young man.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

Required to be constantly recumbent I write slowly and with difficulty.... Weakened in body by infirmities and in mind by age, now far gone into my 83rd year, reading one newspaper only and forgetting immediately what I read.

To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.

Life's Tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

I want to grow old without facelifts. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I have made.

Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Time isn't the enemy. Fear of change is. Accept that nothing lasts forever and you'll start to appreciate the advantages of whatever age you are now.

I want to sit with 80- and 90-year-old people more than anyone. They have played this game before. Not one of them has told me, 'I wish I had more money.'

Shall I never see a bachelor of three score again?

The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

She looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure sincere warmth of heart to old age.

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer's disease where they slowly began to recover other people's lost memories.

I'm suffering from oxygen deprivation. It's overwhelming watching your career go by.

For all of us, as we grow older, perhaps the most important thing is to keep alive our love of others and to believe that our love and interest are as vitally necessary to them as to us. This is what makes us keep on growing and refills the fountains of energy.

Am I aging? The pros and the cons? Well, you know a lot more, at least until the time you start forgetting it all. Actually, aging can be a fun process, to some degree.

You want to look younger... rent smaller children.

Why is old considered useless? Because in old age, the emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: Being? What do you do with it?

Though I have many words,What woman's satisfied,I am no longer faintBecause at her side?O who could have foretoldThat the heart grows old?

So far, this is the oldest I've been.

Sorrow ages you prematurely. When you're in emotional debt, you're pessimistic about the future and, even in your green years, long to return to the past to remedy the shortfalls of love and opportunity you suffered.

At 50, if you are on a diet on your birthday, you can't eat a piece of your birthday cake. So grab two, a piece in each hand and, lo and behold, you will be on a balanced diet! Happy birthday, old chum!

Let's put it this way: there wouldn't be much point in me attending a high-school reunion now because there wouldn't be anybody there. We'd struggle to raise a quorum.

As you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself.