Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

age

Age is not all decay it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

No man is ever old enough to know better.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate they are green and vigorous in old age.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.

Youth is a blunder Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

Age appears to be best in four things old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

Age, like distance lends a double charm.

At my age flowers scare me.

At twenty years of age the will reigns at thirty, the wit and at forty, the judgment.

Filth and old age, I'm sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity.

God employs several translators some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.

I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.

I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted and they will always destroy me.

I smoke ten to fifteen cigars a day. At my age I have to hold on to something.

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

I would go out with women my age, but there are no women my age.

I'm at the age now where just putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.

I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere.

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.

It is not the young people that degenerate they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

My age and health will never allow me to realize the dream of art I've been pursuing all my life.

Nice to be here? At my age it's nice to be anywhere.

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

People say women shouldn't have long hair over a certain age, but I've never done what everyone says.

Pretend to be dumb, that's the only way to reach old age.

Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

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

Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.

Forty is the old age of youth fifty the youth of old age.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

The age we live in is a busy age in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.

We are always the same age inside.

What though youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

Age does not matter if the matter does not age.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

He has a profound respect for old age. Especially when it's bottled.

If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.

Live your life and forget your age.

Old age is the verdict of life.

One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up.

Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.

The first feminine feature that goes, with advancing age, is the neck.

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.

In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

Old age is no place for sissies.

Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

The golden age is before us, not behind us.

The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away than what it leaves behind.

To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.

To me - old age is always ten years older than I am.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

'Age' is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

Age considers youth ventures.

All diseases run into one, old age.

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

If youth knew if age could.

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.

Study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

There are only two things a child will share willingly communicable diseases and its mother's age.

We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts old age is slow in both.

A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.

A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.

Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

I was born at the age of twelve on an MGM lot.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

The secret of long life is double careers. One to about age sixty, then another for the next thirty years.

There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone but, years after, we know it was much later.

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

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

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Each moment of a happy lover's hour is worth an age of dull and common life.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.

Sure I played, did you think I was born at the age of 70 sitting in a dugout trying to manage guys like you?

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.

The trick is growing up without growing old.

The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

A woman has the age she deserves.

Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.

One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Reason is a crutch for age, but youth is strong enough to walk alone.

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age.

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

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

Women lie about their age men lie about their income.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age he dies of being a man.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, 'Why not?' and the other, 'Why bother?'

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

The 19th century was the age of Individualism the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

The defects of the mind, like those of the face, grow worse with age.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

Age acquires no value save through thought and discipline.

Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.

Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

I am a grandmother now, and that means age is creeping on, creeping on.

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

It takes a long time to become young.

Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.

Old minds are like old horses you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.

Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

Youth has no age.

A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

Confidence is something you're born with. I know I had loads of it even at the age of 15.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

I shall not grow conservative with age.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

Middle age occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.

Old age is a shipwreck.

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

There must be a day or two in a man's life when he is the precise age for something important.

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.

Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance.

We are in an electronic technology age now and it's about time we put away the old stuff.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.