AGE

Related Subjects: Antiquity, Children, Decay, Past, Time, Youth

1. Grow up as soon as you can. It pays. The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty.—HERVEY ALLEN, Anthony Adverse

2. Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things,—old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.—BACON, Apothegms

3. She was not old, nor young, nor at the years
   Which certain people call a "certain age,"
   Which yet the most uncertain age appears.—BYRON, Beppo

4. 'Tis said that persons living on annuities
   Are longer lived than others.—BYRON, Don Juan

5. A man is as old as he's feeling,
   A woman as old as she looks.—MORTIMER COLLINS, How Old Are You?'

6. 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

7. I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.—GOLDSMITH, She Stoops to Conquer

8. Age, like distance, lends a double charm.—O. W. HOLMES, A Rhymed Lesson

9. The Grecian ladies counted their age from their marriage, not their birth.—HOMER

10. Age is the most terrible misfortune that can happen to any man; other evils will mend, this is every day getting worse.—GEORGE JAMES, Richelieu

11. A woman is no older than she looks.—Proverb

12. As old as the itch.—Proverb

13. How much more elder art thou than thy looks.—SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice

14. Old age is but a second childhood.—ARISTOPHANES, The Clouds

15. The hoary head is a crown of glory.—Bible, Proverbs, 16:31

16. In old age we live under the shadow of Death, which, like a sword of Damocles, may descend at any moment, but we have so long found life to be an affair of being rather frightened than hurt that we have become like the people who live under Vesuvius, and chance it without much misgiving.—SAMUEL BUTLER, The Way of All Flesh

17. Let him draw out his old age to dotage drop by drop.—CAECILIUS STATIUS, Hymn

18. The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured.—CICERO, De Senectute

19. Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.—CICERO, De Senectute

20. Old age is by nature rather talkative.—CICERO, De Senectute

21. For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old, so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young ; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man, but he will never be an old man in mind.—CICERO, De Senectute

22. Intelligence, and reflection, and judgment, reside in old men, and if there had been none of them, no states could exist at all.—CICERO, De Senectute

23. Not yet by time completely silver'd o'er,
    Bespoke him past the bounds of freakish youth,
    But strong for service still, and unimpair'd.—COWPER, The Task

24. Of no distemper, of no blast he died,
    But fell like autumn fruit that mellow'd long,—
    Even wonder'd at because he dropp'd no sooner.
    Fate seem'd to wind him up for four­score years,
    Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more;
    Till like a clock worn out with eating time,
    The wheels of weary life at last stood still.—DRYDEN, Oedipus

25. Old men in impotence can beget
    New wars to kill the lusty young.
    Young men can sing: old men forget
    That any song was ever sung.—ARTHUR D. FICKE, Youth and Age

26. Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant time. It is true that you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator, and, if you have really played your part. You are more content to sit down and watch.—JANE E. HARRISON, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

27. To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.—O. W. HOLMES

28. Old men are only walking hospitals.—HORACE, Ars Poetica

29. When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.—VICTOR HUGO, Les Miserables

30. Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.—VICTOR HUGO

31. The heads of strong old age are beautiful
    Beyond all grace of youth. They have strange quiet,
    Integrity, health, soundness, to the full
    They've dealt with life and been atempered by it.—ROBINSON JEFFERS, Promise of Peace

32. No man is so old but thinks he may yet live another year.—ST. JEROME

33. It is a man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life

34. The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly, than in an inveterate dislike of interruption.—CHARLES LAMB, That Home is Home Though it is Never so Homely

35. Old age is the "Front Line" of life, moving into No Man's Land.—STEPHEN LEACOCK, This Business of Growing Old

36. Ah, nothing is too late,
    Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
    Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
    Wrote his grand Oedipus and Simonides
    Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
    When each had numbered more than fourscore years.
    Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
    At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
    Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
    Completed Faust when eighty years were past.—LONGFELLOW, Morituri Salutamus

37. For 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.—LONGFELLOW, Morituri Salutamus

38. As if old age were never kindly as well as frosty; as if it had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life!—LOWELL, A Good Word for Winter

39. A comely olde man as busie as a bee.—JOHN LYLY, Euphues & his England

40. Whoever saw old age which did not praise the past time and blame the present?—MONTAIGNE, Essays

41. The old men know when an old man dies.—OGDEN NASH, Old Men

42. Be old betimes, that thou mayst long be so.—Proverb

43. An old man hath the almanack in his body.—Proverb

44. A man, as he manages himself, may die old at thirty or young at eighty.—Proverb

45. The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.—SANTAYANA, Dialogues in Limbo

46. Thus aged men, full loth and slow,
    The vanities of life forego,
    And count their youthful follies o'er,
    Till Memory lends her light no more.—SCOTT, Rokeby

47. His withered cheek, and tresses gray, Seem'd to have known a better day.—SCOTT, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

48. Therefore my age is as a lusty winter, frosty, but kindly.—SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

49. They say an old man is twice a child.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

50. But age, with his stealing steps,
    Hath claw'd me in his clutch.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

51. An old man, broken with the storms of state,
    Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
    Give him a little earth for charity!—SHAKESPEARE, Henry VIII

52. A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.—SHAKESPEARE, King Lear

53. My way of life
    Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf;
    And that which should accompany old age,
    As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
    I must not look to have.—SHAKESPEARE, Macbeth

54. A good old man, sir; he will be talking; as they say,
    When the age is in, the wit is out.—SHAKESPEARE, Much Ado About Nothing

55. I am declined
    Into the vale of years.—SHAKESPEARE, Othello

56. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,
    Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care.—SHAKESPEARE, The Passionate Pilgrim

57. Capt. Shotover: Take care: I am in my dotage. Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.—BERNARD SHAW, Heartbreak House

58. This is our portion at the close of life,
    Strengthless—companionless.—SOPHOCLES, Oedipus Coloneus

59. No man loves life like him that's growing old.—SOPHOCLES, Acrisius

60. What with its crude awakenings can youth know of the rich returns of awareness to elderly people from their afternoon naps; of their ironic thoughts and long retrospections, and the sweetness they taste of not being dead?—LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Afterthoughts

61. Looked as if she had walked straight out of the ark.—SYDNEY SMITH, Lady Holland's Memoir

62. That sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.—SYDNEY SMITH, Lady Holland's Memoir

63. Age in a virtuous person, of either sex, carries in it an authority which makes it preferable to all the pleasures of youth.—SIR RICHARD STEELE, The Spectator

64. She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.—SWIFT, Polite Conversation

65. Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.—SWIFT, Thoughts on Various Subjects

66. Age carries all things, even the mind, away.—VERGIL, Bucolics

67. Say what thou wilt, the young are happy never.
    Give me bless'd Age, beyond the fire and f ever,—
    Past the delight that shatters, hope that stings,
    And eager flutt'ring of life's ignorant wings.—WILLIAM WATSON, Epigram

68. Thanks in old age,—thanks ere I go,
    For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air—for life, mere life,
    For precious ever-lingering memories.—WALT WHITMAN, Thanks in Old Age

69. I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.—OSCAR WILDE, A Woman of No Importance

70. But an old age serene and bright, And lovely as a Lapland night,
    Shall lead thee to thy grave.—WORDSWORTH, To a Young Lady

71. When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire take down this book.—W. B. YEATS, When You are Old
    

72. The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in multiplicity is beginning.—AMIEL, Journal

73. Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit and its own ways.—BOILEAU, The Art of Poetry

74. Every age,
    Heroic in proportions, double-faced,
    Looks backward and before, expects a morn
    And claims an epos.—ELIZABETH B. BROWNING, Aurora Leigh

75. To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.—BURKE, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

76. This Age will serve to make a very pretty farce for the next.—SAMUEL BUTLER, Remains

77. Oh, this age! how tasteless and ill-bred it is!—CATULLUS, Odes

78. Conspire to censure and expose the age.—WENTWORTH DILLON, Essay on Translated Verse

79. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.—EMERSON, Conduct of Life

80. Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul.—THOMAS GRAY, The Bard

81. In this Age, when it is said of a man, He knows how to live, it may be implied he is not very honest.—LORD HALIFAX, Works

82. The ages roll
    Forward; and forward with them, draw my soul
    Into time's infinite sea.—OWEN MEREDITH, The Wanderer

83. For each age is a dream that is dying,
    Or one that is coming to birth.—ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY, The Music-Makers

84. What an age is this and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.—SAMUEL PEPYS, Diary

85. One is always of his age and especially he who least appears so.—SAINTE-BEUVE

86. The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

87. The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe.—SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

88. O miserable age!SHAKESPEARE, Henry VI

89. These most brisk and giddy-paced times.—SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

90. The age is dull and mean. Men creep, Not walk.—WHITTER, Lines Inscribed to Friends under Arrest for Treason Against the Slave Power.

91. Born in an age more curious than devout.—EDWARD YOUNG, Night Thoughts