Aging Quotes

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 finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

~ Eve Ensler

Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.

~ Yoko Ono

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

~ George Orwell

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.

~ Martin Amis

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

Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.

~ Lynsay Sands

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.

~ Mitch Albom

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.

~ Douglas Coupland

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate......I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over.

~ Douglas Coupland

Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.

~ Shannon L. Alder

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

~ Mark Twain

As you get older; you've probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You'll be talking with somebody at a party, and you'll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can't remember his or her name. This can be very embarassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse.

~ Dave Barry

Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.

~ Haruki Murakami

Nat: Maybe you broke something.Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.

~ Herb Gardner

Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended.

~ Sara Gruen

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.

~ Alain De Botton

THE FOUR HEAVENLY FOUNTAINSLaugh, I tell youAnd you will turn backThe hands of time.Smile, I tell youAnd you will reflectThe face of the divine.Sing, I tell youAnd all the angels will sing with you!Cry, I tell youAnd the reflections found in your pool of tears -Will remind you of the lessons of today and yesterdayTo guide you through the fears of tomorrow.

~ Suzy Kassem

George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.

~ Elisabeth Elliot

The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.

~ Dante Alighieri

Wisdom is the reward for surviving our own stupidity.

~ Brian Rathbone

It's always hard to remember love - years pass and you say to yourself, Was I really in love, or was I just kidding myself? Was I really in love, or was I just pretending he was the man of my dreams? Was I really in love, or was I just desperate?

~ Nora Ephron

Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.

~ Suzy Kassem

The old continued to have one resurgence of foolishness after another, until the organism gave out altogether.

~ Saul Bellow

You’ve climbed too many mountains and crossed too many rivers to stop and turn back now.

~ Eleanor Brownn

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

~ Gina Barreca

Old folks live on memory, young folk live on hope.

~ Gayla Reid

Always count your blessings, even if you have to count them through your tears

~ Eleanor Brownn

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

~ Anna Quindlen

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

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

Good thing I'm aging, otherwise I'd be dead.

~ Ana Monnar

Time erodes us all.

~ Meg Rosoff

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

~ Jennifer Egan

Our body is a sacred temple A place to connect with people. As we aren't staying any younger We might as well keep it stronger.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

We may not stay quick, If we are weak or sage, but a lot can squeak As we start to age.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

We envy people who are extremely old because we wish to live that long, not because we want to be that old.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling betrayals of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

I'm finding that the older I get, it's not that I learn new things, it's more like I find out how much of what I know is common knowledge.

~ Sam Lipsyte