"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
— Mark Twain

"My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is."
— Ellen DeGeneres

"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
— H.L. Mencken

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

"Yes, we praise women over 40 for a multitude of reasons. Unfortunately, it's not reciprocal. For every stunning, smart, well-coiffed, hot woman over 40, there is a bald, paunchy relic in yellow pants making a fool of himself with some 22-year old waitress. Ladies, I apologize. For all those men who say, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?", here's an update for you. Nowadays 80%of women are against marriage. Why? Because women realize it's not worth buying an entire pig just to get a little sausage!"
— Andy Rooney

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything."
— Oscar Wilde

"I do note with interest that old women in my books become young women on the covers... this is discrimination against the chronologically gifted."
— Terry Pratchett

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems)

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Just remember, when you’re over the hill, you begin to pick up speed."
— Charles M. Schulz

"When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick."
— George Burns

"By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Some guy said to me: Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll?

I said: You'd better check with Mick Jagger."
— Cher

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."
— Salvador Dali

"The oldest fiddle plays the sweetest tune."
— Irish Proverb

"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories."
— Garrison Keillor

"As soon as you're born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all...till you're so full of fear you can't function at all. A working class hero is something to be."
— John Lennon

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"When You Are Old"


WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."
— William Butler Yeats

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
— Milan Kundera

"Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Twenty-three is old. It's almost 25, which is like almost mid-20s."
— Jessica Simpson

"It's paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone."
— Andy Rooney

"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified."
— Martin Luther

"The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime."
— Pink Floyd, "Free Four"

"Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites."
— Katherine Dunn

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
— T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land and Other Poems)

"It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive."
— Erma Bombeck

"When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good."
— Karl Lagerfeld

"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
—chapter 1, "Economy""
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience)

"I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter..."
— Clive Barker (Mister B. Gone CD)

"At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly."
— Mark Haddon (A Spot of Bother)

"I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson's Prose and Poetry)

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

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps up omnibuses."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:

Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.

Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.

Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.

Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.

I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.

Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.

Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.

Amen"
— Margot Benary-Isbert