Old Age Quotes - Page 18

• [On being the oldest living human being:] God must have forgotten me.

  Jeanne Calment

  Age, Forgotten, Humans

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• The young see what they wish to see. The old see what they do not wish.

  Bette Lord

  Wish, Age, Youth

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• Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

  Mary Augusta Ward

  Age, Generations, Helping

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• The essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Essence, Age, Intellect

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.160, Harvard University Press

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• As a youth, I sought out decadence; as an elder, I try to avoid decay.

  Mason Cooley

  Trying, Age, Decay

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• Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.

  Angela Carter

  Taken, Cat, Acceptance

  Angela Carter (1993). “Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings”, Vintage Books

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• Singularity is only pardonable in old age and retirement; I may now be as singular as I please, but you may not.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Retirement, Age, May

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.307, Oxford University Press

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• All I can say, in answer to this kind queries [of friends] is that I have not the distemper called the Plague; but that I have allthe plagues of old age, and of a shattered carcase.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Health, Age, Answers

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• Nothing is more ridiculous in old people that were once good-looking, than to forget that they are not so still.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Beauty, People, Age

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• Old age likes to dwell in the recollections of the past, and, mistaking, the speedy march of years, often is inclined to take the prudence of the winter time for a fat wisdom of, midsummer days. Manhood is bent to the passing cares of the passing moment, and holds so closely to his eyes the sheet of, "to-day," that it screens the "to-morrow" from his sight.

  Lajos Kossuth

  Eye, Winter, Past

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• When you're my age, you have the feeling sometimes that you're seeing the show come round again.

  John le Carre

  Feelings, Age, Sometimes

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• I am in the pitiable situation of feeling all the force of temptation without having the strength to succumb to it.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Temptation, Feelings, Age

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• In infants, levity is a prettiness; in men a shameful defect; but in old age, a monstrous folly.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Men, Age, Levity

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• Life grows darker as we go on, till only one pure light is left shining on it; and that is faith. Old age, like solitude and sorrow, has its revelations.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Faith, Light, Shining

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• The essence of any plan for financing old age is saving-to put aside some part of today's earnings for the future. Anything that saps the value of savings-and inflation is the worst single threat-is the enemy of the aged and of those who expect to grow old.

  Bernard Baruch

  Essence, Enemy, Age

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• Old age makes caricatures of us all.

  P. D. James

  Age, Caricatures

  P. D. James (2010). “A Taste for Death”, p.239, Vintage

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• True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.

  Sophie Swetchine

  Artist, Poetry, Childhood

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• And when I'm introduced to one
  I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

  Walter Raleigh

  Fun, Wish, Age

  "Wishes of an Elderly Man" l. 1 (1923)

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• Many talents preserve their precociousness right into old age.

  Karl Kraus

  Age, Talent, Preserves

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• Old age is the Outpatient's Dept of purgatory.

  William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

  Age, Purgatory

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• [On her 101-year-old sister and herself, at 103:] We have a lot to do ... People don't understand this. They think we're sitting around in rocking chairs, which isn't at all true. Why, we don't even own a rocking chair.

  Sarah Louise Delany

  Thinking, Years, People

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• To love is a pleasure of youth, a sin in old age.

  Publilius Syrus

  Love Is, Age, Youth

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• Conquest, tyranny, treachery, and the clash of cultures bring about corrupt societies, and so does old age. Sometimes the five faces of corruption are visible at the same time.

  Robert Payne

  Age, Faces, Doe

  Robert Payne (1975). “The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America”, Praeger Publishers

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• But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Eye, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.74, Penguin

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• Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling.

  Murasaki Shikibu

  Travel, Recovery, Age

  Murasaki Shikibu (2011). “The Tale of Genji”, p.1360, Tuttle Publishing

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