Ageing Quotes

Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.''Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

~ Margery Williams Bianco

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. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

~ W.b. Yeats

I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.

~ Karl Pilkington

...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

~ Terry Pratchett

I bargained with Life for a penny,And Life would pay no more, However I begged at eveningWhen I counted my scanty store;For Life is just an employer,He gives you what you ask,But once you have set the wages,Why, you must bear the task.I worked for a menial's hire,Only to learn, dismayed,That any wage I had asked of Life,Life would have paid.

~ Jessie B. Rittenhouse

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Self-observation is simply the observation of an internal state and an external event. It is pure awareness, which gives one the ability to choose one's actions. Only by having the choice can one perform what is right.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.

~ Giacomo Leopardi

They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

I just got a rather nasty shock. In looking for something or other I came across the fact that one of my cats is about to be nine years old, and that another of them will shortly thereafter be eight; I have been labouring under the delusion they were about five and six. And yesterday I happened to notice in the mirror that while I have long since grown used to my beard being very grey indeed, I was not prepared to discover that my eyebrows are becoming noticeably shaggy. I feel the tomb is just around the corner. And there are all these books I haven't read yet, even if I am simultaneously reading at least twenty...

~ Edward Gorey

An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress

~ W.b. Yeats

I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.

~ W.b. Yeats

These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.

~ Mark Strand

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

~ Alfred Tennyson

What do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?Or do they fancy there's really been no change,And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange; Why aren't they screaming?

~ Philip Larkin

Behold yon rough and flinty roadWhere youth, now youth no more,Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loavesHe cast away of yore.

~ Emma Ghent Curtis

Growing older doesn't mean that you are more mature than everyone who is younger than you. Maturity is a lot of things, and age has nothing to do with it.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

The youthful body untouched decays the fastest, for no living hands record its splendor; and here youth and time are wasted.

~ Roman Payne

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity... How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced – and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation.

~ Carol Shields

I was thinking not very long ago about the difference between the people we grew up with vs. the people we're growing old with - not always being one and the same - and how time (and the memories we forge together) really does strengthen pretty much all of our relationships/friendships (whether they had started on the right foot or not). And I guess what I've mostly learned (by moving to NZ especially) is that the more Significant people you have in your life, the more 'manageable' the idea of loss, losing a loved-one, can become - not because you can replace them (obviously you can't) or because they're interchangeable (no one is), but because like a foundation to a house the more pillars you have (people you love) holding it up (loving you) the more solid/resilient you become - and from there, I find you're better equipped to overcome whatever life throws your way. That said time does pass us by very quickly. I find it much more noticeable through our growing kids than ever before.

~ Kim Dallmeier

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

~ Christopher Hitchens

In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast wih those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions.

~ Anthony Powell

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

~ Pat Conroy

One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

~ W.b. Yeats

Your age is measured by your dreams not by the years.

~ Amit Ray

Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.

~ Ashton Applewhite

Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.

~ Richard Flanagan

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude.

~ Guy De Maupassant

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

~ Núria Añó

He looked up at her. Age and worry had taken their toll on her frail body, but she was kind and beautiful. And for a moment, memories and thoughts swam to the surface, the world coming into utter clarity. And all of them revolved around Amanda, his wife of fifty years.

~ Crissy Moss

Sometimes even a Yes can be fatal for our Souls

~ Abhysheq Shukla

Passion + Vision +Skill + Mentoring = Success.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

True Relations never break and relation which breaks were never true

~ Abhysheq Shukla

Living your life is a task so difficult it has never been attempted before.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

Life is a do-it-yourself project.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

A beautiful woman should always have at the back of her mind that her ravishing appearance is only an ephemeral quality. When she wakes up in the morning, looks into the mirror, and notices that something is fading away, she knows that the time is ripe for marriage. She should be careful of who she takes into her life because the union is gonna be everlasting.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

...we're not eighteen anymore. We've lived. We've created things that last – things of joy, and things of burden.

~ Dianna Hardy