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aging |
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It
takes a long time
to become young.
Pablo Picasso |
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Age
does not depend upon years, but upon
temperament and health. Some people
are born old, and some never grow so.
Tryon
Edwards |
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The
whole of life is a journey toward youthful
old age, toward self-contemplation, love,
gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most
gratifying time of our lives. . . . "Old
age"
should be a harvest time when the riches
of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it
continues to be a special period for
self-development and expansion.
Ashley
Montague |
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The
span of life vouchsafed us, three-score and ten, is short
enough, if the spirit
gets too haughty and wants to live forever; but on the other
hand,
it is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. .
. . Anyone who is wise
and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion
and morals
and politics through the rise and fall of three generations
should be perfectly
content to rise from his or her seat and go away saying
"It was a good show" when the curtain falls.
Lin
Yutang |
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The
thing you are ripening toward is the fruit of your
life. It will make you bright inside, no
matter what you are outside. It is a shining
thing.
Stewart
Edward White |
When
Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two
sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard
all over his face, and the inscription, "I am
still learning."
Simone
de Beauvoir |
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What remains to me of strength becomes more
precious for what is lost. I have lost one ear,
but was never so alive to sweet sounds as now. My
sight is so far impaired that the brightness
in which nature was revealed to me in my youth is dimmed,
but I never looked on nature
with such pure joy as now. My limbs soon tire, but I
never felt it such a privilege to move
about in the open air, under the sky in sight of the
infinity of creation, as at this moment. I almost think that my simple food, eaten by rule, was never
relished so well. I am grateful
then for my earthly tabernacle, though it does creak and
shake not a little.
William Ellery Channing |
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Parts
of the aging process are scary, of course, but the more we
know about them,
the less they need be. That is why I wish we were more
deliberate, in our early years,
to prepare for this condition. It would leave a lot of
us freed to enjoy the obvious
rewards of being old. . . . What is important is that our
dispassionate acceptance
of attrition be matched by a full use of everything that has
ever happened in all
the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind
from his or her body. . .
to use the experience, both great and evil, so that physical
annoyances are
surmountable in an alert and even mirthful appreciation of
life itself.
M.F.K.
Fisher |
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Wisdom
doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing
does--except wrinkles.
It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if
the grapes were good in the first place.
Abigail
van Buren |
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Do
not grow old, no matter how long you live.
Never cease to stand like curious children
before the Great Mystery into which we are born.
Albert
Einstein |
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intend to go on with my life by living it, not by
buying into some notion that I no longer have the
potential to become still better. I refuse to
take seriously society's idea that at the arbitrary
age of 65 I am suddenly a lamp going out.
Roger
S. Mills |
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Youth
is not a time of life--it is a state of mind. Nobody
grows old
by merely living a number of years; people grow old by
deserting their ideals.
Years may wrinkle your skin, but to give up enthusiasm
wrinkles your soul.
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as
young as your
self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope,
as old as your despair.
In the central place of your heart there is a recording
chamber; so long as it
receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage--so
long are you young.
When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with
the snow
of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then--and only
then--are you grown old.
Douglas
MacArthur |
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When grace combines with wrinkles, it is
admirable.
There is an indescribable light of dawn about intensely
happy old age. . . . The young person is handsome,
but the old, superb.
Victor Hugo |
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A
good old age can be the crown of all our life's experiences,
the masterwork of a lifetime. Behind us are years of
actions
and thoughts that developed us, changed us--and the
world--for
the better or the worse. We know in our inner selves
which
they had been and to what goal they have led.
Helen Nearing |
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I
am old, yet I look at wise men and see that I am very young.
I look over those stars yonder, and into the myriads of the
aspirant and ordered souls, and see I am a stranger and a
youth
and have yet my spurs to win. Too ridiculous are these
airs of age.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson |
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Development
can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth,
beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very
end of life,
given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. .
. .
In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age.
We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our
nineties.
Betty
Friedan |
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Winter
is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me
the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . .
For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose,
verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and
song.
I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a
thousandth part
of that which is within me. When I go down to the
grave,
I can say "I have finished my day's work,"
but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."
Victor Hugo |
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You just don’t make decisions about what
you’re going to be like
when you are old. I
know that I am making that decision right now.
Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world
and God
in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take
over in
old age. Every
time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am
deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical
old man. Our
yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and
our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.
John Powell |
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You’re
never too old to become younger.
Mae West |
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Some
people never seem to grow old. Always active in
thought,
always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable
to fogeyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied,
settled,
yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is,
and are the first to find the best of what will be.
William
Shakespeare |
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Each part of life has its own
pleasures. Each has its own abundant
harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in
body,
but we need never grow old in mind and spirit. No one
is as old as
to think he or she cannot live one more year.
Cicero |
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Up
to one's last breath, one may retain the simple joys of
childhood,
the poetic ecstasies of the young person, the enthusiasms
of maturity. Right to the end, one may intoxicate
one's spirit
with flowers, with beauty and with smiles.
Eliphas
Levi |
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How
old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you was?
Satchel Paige |
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Those who are of a calm and happy nature
will hardly feel the pressure of age.
Plato |
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A
human heart can never grow old if it takes a lively interest
in the pairing of birds,
the reproduction of flowers, and the changing tints of
autumn leaves.
Lydia Maria
Child |
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Physically,
we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether
we go
backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of
consciousness. When
we think about age differently, then our experience of it
changes. We can be
physically older but emotionally and psychologically
younger. Some of us were
in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of
re-birth in our 60s or 70s.
King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men,
described his youth
as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We
can be older than
we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.
Marianne
Williamson |
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Never have I enjoyed youth so
thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing
Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now
all these descriptions of the friends of my youth
and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk
the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful, than it
ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties
and little annoyances of actual living.
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except
spirit. And spirit can enter a human being
perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell
there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of
adventure. But it must be in solitude. I
do not need or desire to hobnob artificially with
other old men in order to revisit them in their
salad days, and to renew my own. In Rome, in
the eternal city, I feel nearer to my own past, and
to the whole past and future of the world, than I
should in any cemetery or in any museum of
relics. Old places and old persons in their
turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic
vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the
balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives
and broad foundations. Everything shines then
for the spirit by its own light in its own place and
time; but not as it shone in its own restless
eyes. For in its own eyes each person and each
place was the centre of a universe full of
threatening and tempting things; but old age, having
less intensity at the centre has more clearness at
the circumference, and knows that just because
spirit, at each point, is a private centre for all
things, no one point, no one phase of spirit is
materially a public centre for all the rest.
George Santayana |
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And
then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and
anonymous. No one
notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It
is a positive thing.
You can move about, unnoticed and invisible.
Doris Lessing |
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