Old Age Quotes - Page 15

• The poet's body even is not fed like other men's, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives adivine life. By the healthful and invigorating thrills of inspiration his life is preserved to a serene old age.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Men, Serenity

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.243, Xist Publishing

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• And if I should live to be
  The last leaf upon the tree
  In the spring,
  Let them smile, as I do now,
  At the old forsaken bough
  Where I cling.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Spring, Tree, Age

  "The Last Leaf " l. 43 (1831)

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• 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.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Growing Up, Men

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• The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Age, Excess, Waste

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.51

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• The hare grows old as she plays in the sun
  And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;
  Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done
  She limps along in an aged whiteness.

  William Butler Yeats

  Eye, Play, Age

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.40, Penguin

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• I had a chair at every hearth,
  When no one turned to see,
  With 'Look at that old fellow there,
  'And who may he be?

  William Butler Yeats

  Age, May, Looks

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.136, Penguin

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• When I was young my teachers were the old.
  I gave up fire for form till I was cold.

  Robert Frost

  Teacher, Fire, Age

  Robert Frost, Robert Faggen (2006). “The Notebooks of Robert Frost”, p.744, Harvard University Press

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• You will perceive by my preaching that I am growing old: it is the privilege of years, and I am sure you will pardon it from the purity of it's motives.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Years, Age, Growing

  Thomas Jefferson, Lyman Henry Butterfield (1954). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: 1 November, 1785 to 22 June, 1786”

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• All-devouring time, envious age,
  Nought can escape you, and by slow degrees,
  Worn by your teeth, all things will lingering die.

  Ovid

  Time, Age, Degrees

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• Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

  George Santayana

  Memories, Self, Bird

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

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• And now I'm old and going--I'm sure I can't tell where;
  One comfort is, this world's so hard, I can't be worse off there

  Charles Kingsley

  Age, Comfort, World

  Charles Kingsley (1858). “Andromeda: And Other Poems”, p.94

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• Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.

  Lydia M. Child

  Prayer, Heart, People

  Letter to Harriet Seward, 1869.

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• But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.

  Albert Camus

  Age, Experience, World

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• Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.

  Albert Camus

  Marriage, Hair, Numbers

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• There is no such thing as the old age of the wise.

  Sophocles

  Wise, Wisdom, Age

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• We hold the moral obligation of providing for old age, helpless infancy, and poverty is far superior to that of supplying the invented wants of courtly extravagance.

  Thomas Paine

  Justice, Age, Extravagance

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THE AGE OF REASON - Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Including “The Life of Thomas Paine”): Deistic Critique of Bible and Christian Church”, p.350, e-artnow

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• I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.

  Gertrude Stein

  Tired, Age, Way

  Gertrude Stein (1946). “Brewsie and Willie”

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• Old age is
  a flight of small
  cheeping birds
  skimming
  bare trees
  above a snow glaze.

  William Carlos Williams

  Snow, Bird, Tree

  William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.152, New Directions Publishing

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• Youth is rather to be pitied than envied by people in years since it is doomed to toil through the rugged road of life which the others have passed through, in search of happiness that is not to be met with in it and that, at the highest, can be compounded for only by the blessing of a contented mind.

  Samuel Richardson

  Happiness, Blessing, Years

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• Old men, imagining themselves under obligation to young paramours, seldom keep any thing from their knowledge.

  Samuel Richardson

  Men, Age, Imagine

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• I'm afraid to look in the mirror. I'm afraid I'm going to see an old lady with white hair, just like the old ladies in the park. Alittle bundle in a black shawl just waiting for the coffin.

  Paddy Chayefsky

  Fear, Mirrors, Hair

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• I'm just an old man and I smell bad, remember?

  Stanley Kubrick

  Men, Smell, Rejection

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• It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

  Louise Bogan

  Life, Writing, Poetry

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• Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Truth, Past, Yesterday

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• Distinctly different as a child, as an adolescent, in his prime and in his old age, man considers himself as one, not because he acts, but because he knows.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Children, Knowledge, Men

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