quotations and passages on aging

To be seventy years young
is sometimes far more
cheerful and hopeful than
to be forty years old.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

If you carry your childhood with you,
you never become older.

Abraham Sutzkever

Age is a question of mind over matter.
If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Satchel Paige

There is a fountain of youth; it is your mind, your talents,
the creativity you bring to your life and the lives
of the people you love. When you will learn to tap
this source, you will have truly defeated age.

Sophia Loren

Nature gives you the face
you have at twenty; it is up to
you to merit the face
you have at fifty.

Coco Chanel

To me, old age is always
fifteen years older than I am.

Bernard M. Baruch

I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing old age
that it is a time of discovery. If they say "Of what?"
I can only answer "We must find out for ourselves,
otherwise it wouldn't be discovery."

Florida Scott-Maxwell

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

Robert Browning

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not
be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

James A. Garfield

Cheerfulness and content are great beautifiers,
and are famous preservers of youthful looks.

Charles Dickens

On Growing Old

Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying,
My dog and I are old, too old for roving,
Man, whose passion sets the spindrift flying
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving.

I take the book and gather to the fire,
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute,
The clock ticks to my heart; a withered wire
Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.

I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
Your cornland, nor your hill-land nor your valleys,
Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.

Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.

Beauty, have pity, for the strong have power,
The rich their wealth, the beautiful their grace,
Summer of man its sunlight and its flower,
Spring time of man all April in a face.

Only, as in the jostling in the Strand,
Where the mob thrusts or loiters or is loud
The beggar with the saucer in his hand
Asks only a penny from the passing crowd,

So, from this glittering world with all its fashion,
Its fire and play of men, its stir, its march,
Let me have wisdom, Beauty, wisdom and passion,
Bread to the soul, rain where the summers parch.

Give me but these, and though the darkness close,
Even the night will blossom as the rose.

John Masefield

Growing Old

Let me grow lovely, growing old--
So many fine things to do;
Laces and ivory, and gold,
And silks need not be new;

And there is healing in old trees,
Old streets a glamour hold;
Why may not I, as well as these,
Grow lovely, growing old?

Karle Wilson Baker

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is
a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear
the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: "The work is done."
But just as one says that, the answer comes: "The race is over,
but the work never is done while the power to work remains."
The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to a rest.
It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night

Youth, large, lusty, loving--youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid--day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness.

Walt Whitman

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I think we exaggerate the flexibility
and freshness of young people.
Advanced age can be conducive to conceptual skills
that are extraordinarily important.

Ross Webber

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age,
but they die young.

Anonymous

Old people are always young enough
to learn, with profit.

Aeschylus

A half century of living should put a good deal into a person's face
besides a few wrinkles and some unwelcome folds around the chin.

Frances Parkinson Keyes

How can anyone be anything but their age? The trick is to love your age.
Love it when you're young and strong and foolish. Love it
when you're old and wise. Love it in the middle when the challenges
come and you can solve some of them, maybe most of them. If you love
your age, you'll never go around wishing you were some other age.

Miss Lucy (qtd. by Arthur Gordon)

Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty--
they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.

Martin Buxbaum

Simplify. Stop bothering with the non-essentials. Having devoted my life to my work so far, I should reap the harvest and learn how to live the rest of it properly. It's time now for trees and grass and growing things.

Author Unknown

One's age should be tranquil, as childhood should be playful.
Hard work at either extremity of life seems out of place.
At midday the sun may burn, and men labor under it;
but the morning and evening should be alike calm and cheerful.

Thomas Arnold

To resist the frigidity of old age,
one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart.
And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.

Bonstettin

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing
sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth
in a better world.

Lydia M. Child

You must not pity me because
my sixtieth year finds me still astonished.
To be astonished is one of the surest ways
of not growing old too quickly.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It is not how old you are,
but how you are old.

Marie Dressler

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

Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries
for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those
who have used him well; making them old men and women
inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits
young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is
but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them
his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch
in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.

Charles Dickens

I planted a maple tree next to the first house I owned, just a skinny runt of a thing. . . .
It seemed far off in the future before that tree would amount to anything.
But when I went back there forty years later, I couldn't believe my eyes.
The tree was towering over the house, the queen of the neighborhood.
In the meantime, I'd become an old man. This was the first time I ever really believed
that the world will go on just fine when I'm gone. . . . Ever since then,
I've been living in tree time. It's a fine way to live.

Sean O'Callahan

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years.
People grow old only by deserting their ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin,
but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.

Douglas MacArthur

Never think oldish thoughts.
It's oldish thoughts that
make a person old.

James A. Farley

In youth we learn,
in old age we understand.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom.
When the passions have relaxed their hold,
you have escaped not from one master but from many.

Plato

The aster has not wasted spring and summer because it has not blossomed.
It has been all the time preparing for what is to follow, and in autumn it is
the glory of the field, and only the frost lays it low. So there are many
people who must live forty or fifty years, and have the crude sap of their
natural dispositions changed and sweetened before the blossoming time can
come; but their lives have not been wasted.

Henry Ward Beecher

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary
to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over,
but part of a stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

Bertrand Russell