aging 2 - aging 3 - youth
   

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

Abraham Sutzkever

   

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes



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

Satchel Paige

      

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)

  
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
   

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.

Samuel Ullman

   

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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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

  

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

   

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

  

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

  

   
After thirty we must seize every hour and educate ourselves to
grow into agreeable old age.  It requires at least twenty years to
become well educated in book and college lore.  If we begin to
study at seven we are rarely through with all our common schools,
seminaries, high schools and colleges have to offer under a score
of years.
   The education for old age needs fully as many years.  We
need to begin at thirty to be tolerant, patient, serene, trustful,
sympathetic and liberal.  Then, at fifty, we may hope to have
"graduated with honors" from life's school of wisdom, and to be
prepared for another score or two of years of usefulness
and enjoyment in the practice of these qualities.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Heart of the New Thought
  

It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern,
should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing
all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring
changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, and
with undiminished vigor from youth to middle age, and then how to
carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal
more of the vigor and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do.

Ralph Waldo Trine
"The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit"

  

  

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aging 2 - aging 3 - youth

  

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

  

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.

unattributed

 

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

  

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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

  

Don't just get older, get better.  Live realistically.  Give generously.
Adapt willingly.  Trust fearlessly.  Rejoice daily.

Charles R. Swindoll

  

aging 2 - aging 3 - youth

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
  

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

  

Age has no reality except in the physical world.  The essence of a
human being is resistant to the passage of time.  Our inner lives are
eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and
vigorous as when we were in full bloom.

Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera

   
  

  
It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face
that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.

John O'Donohue
Anam Cara
  

It’s very simple.  As you grow, you learn more.  If you stayed at twenty-two,
you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two.  Aging is not just
decay, you know.  It’s growth.  It’s more than the negative that you’re going
to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die,
and that you live a better life because of it.

Morrie Schwartz

  

I've enjoyed every age I've been, and each has had its own individual
merit.  Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I've been
present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly
for all to see.  Nowadays, I don't want a "perfect" face and body;
I want to wear the life I've lived.

Pat Benatar

   
Understand that your aging is not the condition of your body, because you are not your body.  You are thought. Having your physical form get older is one thing, but you don’t have to get older.  It’s just a way of looking at your life.  Yes, your body will slow down, and it won’t be able to do the things that it could do at one time—but again, most of that is controlled by your thinking.  If you focus solely on your body, then you will notice everything about it that is changing and assess it in a way that says, I am deteriorating.  But if what you are is not your body but your thoughts, then you can never deteriorate.  After all, you can’t kill thoughts.  You can’t kill feelings.  You can only kill form.  And if you know that you are not that form, then you know that your conscious awareness can never die.

Wayne Dyer
Happiness Is the Way
   

      

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(Found online images come from a variety of unattributed
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When Walker first steps onto the road, he has no thoughts, no history, no memories, and no clothes. As he travels and meets people and learns from them, he comes to know more about life, living, and becoming the person he's meant to be. Walker is a parable for all of us who wonder what might be the purpose of life, why bad things happen with almost as much regularity as good things, and how we can learn from the bad examples and experiences in our lives as much as we can learn from the good things. Tom Walsh's parable is a story of the ages, a timeless exploration of ideas and thoughts that all of us wonder about, a sincere and heartfelt portrait of a man who has no past and no future, but who learns to make the most of each precious present moment as it comes.