quotations and passages on aging

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"

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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Articles and book excerpts on Aging:

It's Never Too Late to Learn      Michael C. Futa
Put Joy in Your Life--You're Never Too Old!      Susana Bouquet
Redefining Retirement      Henry Fenwick
What's Your View?      Ray Whiting

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

The compensation of growing old is that the passions remain as
strong as ever, but one has gained-- at last!-- the power which adds
the supreme flavour to existence-- the power of taking hold of
experience, of turning it round, slowly in the light.

Virginia Woolf

Through our actions, we will create a new image of age-- free and joyous,
living with pain, saying what we really think and feel at last-- knowing more
than we ever knew we knew, not afraid of what anyone thinks of us
anymore, moving with wonder into that unknown future we have helped
shape for the generations coming after us.

Betty Friedan
The Fountain of Age

You are never too old to be a creative thinker. In fact, age can be
an asset to creative thinking. I've never liked the term "senior citizen."
I would much rather be called a "seasoned citizen," one who has
been formed and fashioned by all the elements of life: the inspiration
of mountaintops, the depth of the sea, the serenity of valleys, the openness
of the plains, the majesty of sunsets, the thunder and lightning of storms.

Wilferd A. Peterson
The Art of Creative Thinking