Retirement Quotes

“The more your money works for you, the less you have to work for money.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake.”
― Derek Landy, Mortal Coil

“He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“This rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“A man approaching retirement called the retirement office to inquire about his pension. Afterward, he was asked if his wife worked. “She’s worked all her life making me happy”, he replied. “Yes sir, but has she earned money to receive her pension?” “When we got married we agreed on an arrangement”, he said. “I would earn the living, and she would make the living worthwhile”.

“Make the living worthwhile”…have we forgotten the very essence of that? Have we forgotten to live for someone else, that doing so IS what makes a living worthwhile?”
― Kelly Crawford

“Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Mentoring is: Sharing Life's Experiences and God's Faithfulness”
― Janet Thompson, Dear God, He's Home!: A Woman's Guide to Her Stay-At-Home Man

“You get old faster when you think about retirement.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.”
― Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

“I often think about dogs when I think about work and retirement. There are many breeds of dog that just need to be working, and useful, or have a job of some kind, in order to be happy. Otherwise they are neurotically barking, scratching, or tearing up the sofa. A working dog needs to work. And I am a working dog.”
― Martha Sherrill

“He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.”
― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

“The goal of retirement is to live off your assets-not on them”
― Frank Eberhart

“Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.”
― George Washington, George Washington's Farewell Address

“I believe that the biggest mistake that most people make when it comes to their retirement is they do not plan for it. They take the same route as Alice in the story from “Alice in Wonderland,” in which the cat tells Alice that surely she will get somewhere as long as she walks long enough. It may not be exactly where you wanted to get to, but you certainly get somewhere.”
― Mark Singer, The Changing Landscape Of Retirement - What You Don't Know Could Hurt You

“Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born-never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“I feel that one of the most important lessons that can be learned is that what we "see" may be different than what is actually in front of us.”
― Mark Singer, The Changing Landscape Of Retirement - What You Don't Know Could Hurt You

“(The subjects of What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life) "have convinced me that past failing can as easily prove preparatory as predictive. Age does not of itself limit on enable us. The choice is ours.”
― Bruce Frankel

“Learn the lessons of history. Don't let how you feel about your tenure at your organization drive you to make poor investment decisions that could potentially derail a successful retirement.”
― Mark Singer, The Changing Landscape Of Retirement - What You Don't Know Could Hurt You

“But whereas Cyrus wanted his praises to be sung by all human beings, Xenophon was concerned primarily with honor from his friends.[125] Unlike Cyrus, he was not as eager for praise from incompetent judges as from competent ones. This difference helps us to understand his equanimity in the face of the most varied political fortunes: for example, the dignity and wit with which he defended himself when confronted with ingratitude and baseless hostility on the part of the very men whose lives he had saved.[126] It helps us also to understand his ability to leave political life to return to a private life. [...] Country retirement, while lacking the immediate challenges to heart and mind presented by politics at their peak, would have appealed to him as allowing more leisure for contemplation and writing—especially since that contemplation might embrace, as we know from the Anabasis that it did, his own political experiences among other things. For a man like Xenophon, the contemplative reliving of experiences was sure to be a deepening of them. It could thus have been looked forward to as promising a more profound enjoyment than the original experiences themselves, and one less mixed with pain.

[125]Cyropaedia III 2.31; Anabasis VI 1.20. 126.
[126]Anabasis VII 6.11 ff.; compare V 7.5 ff. and 8.2 ff.”
― Leo Strauss, History of Political Philosophy

“Some Florida retirees were financially ruined by hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“Florida as a retirement community may have ended with hurricane Ian.”
― Steven Magee

“The retirement age of 65 was chosen because most people were dead at that age a hundred years ago! It was a government con: Work hard and you can look forward to your retirement!”
― Steven Magee

“Mischievous Community of Snowbirds”
― Kris Courtney, Florida Retirement Is Murder

“We had made the exciting discovery that our lives do not need to be limited to past experiences. The future could be challenging and fulfilling as well.”
― Jimmy Carter, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life

“As our mountain friend says, 'It takes about forty-five or fifty years before we realize that we can go to bed at about ten o'clock and not miss anything much.”
― Jimmy Carter, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life

“But we do have something we never had before: we have the added pressure of time. We can no longer wait around for the ideal opportunity. If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth, then we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer. There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.”
― Jimmy Carter, Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life

“When had they started to talk about booking into a retirement place? Was it in their early sixties? Starting to worry about places being full? Peer pressure? Turning the dimmer switch on their lives.”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer