Old Age Quotes

It is gracious to have old people full of vitality and endowed with wisdom in our society.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When illness and old age are no longer indulgent and strength is irrevocably seeping away, brightness fades insidiously away from the light of the day and time only betrays reckless evanescence. (“Into a new life”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

We are never old with the strength of the spirit, although the body may fail.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I have a thing for things that last.

~ Criss Jami

The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one,Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.

~ W.b. Yeats

Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.

~ Núria Añó

They say marry the person with whom you are the closest to, the guy with whom you can share your 3 am thoughts with, sitting on a rooftop and discussing random things like why cavemen were hirsute or why the earth isn’t a square. The genie who knows what you want before you open your mouth. The angel who reads your mind before you can articulate your thoughts. The friend you can laugh and cry with. The brother whose arms are safer than any amount of security and protection the outside world can provide you. The parent that will support you through thick and thin, no matter what. The soul whose love for them in the river of your heart will never dilute, even when the currents get rough, and the waters, dark. The fellow who would tell you that he loves you every night and spend the day proving it through little gestures that speak much louder than any words of love. The person with whom you can hold hands when you turn eighty and announce to the world- ‘we made it!

~ Faraaz Kazi

Great beauty and youth capture our attention, excite a deep pleasure; however, why shouldn't our souls gaze at a countenance over which the years have passed? Isn't there a story there, one unknown, full of pain or beauty, which pours its reflection into the features, a story we can read with some compassion or at least get a slight hint of its meaning? The young point toward the future; the old tell of a past.

~ Adalbert Stifter

...her own experience was beginning to tell her that an alert old age can be more keen than the cards.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

In times like these I always cheered myself up with a certain story. I forgot just when I first heard it, or who I heard it from... but, back when I was young it would cheer me up when I was feeling depressed. Basically, you think of life in terms of a single 24 hour day. So if you take the average human lifespan, to be around 72 years, then dividing that by 24... that comes to 3 years per hour. Meaning, that if you were 18 it'd only be 6 AM! 6 in the morning is nothing! Schools aren't even open by then! It's only been a couple of hours before sunrise, the day's just begun! So if you're 18, you can still fix you life by then! In fact even if you were 30 year old, that's still only 10 AM! The sun's still high, and there's still 2 hours until noon! You still have the whole afternoon to fix your life! You could still make something of yourself. I've always been thinking that, but... I'm now 45 years old! 45 divided by 3 is 15 meaning, that the time 3PM! Ring Ring Ring! I can hear the clock, ringing in my mind! There's only 2 hours before work is over at 5PM! I can't redo anything, it's almost time to go home already.

~ Nobuyuki Fukumoto

Persistent smile brings out hollow dimples, and persistent frowns brings out hollow wrinkles.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.Amen

~ Margot Benary-Isbert

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

~ Wendell Berry

Be present and aware of the privilege of living.

~ Ann Marie Frohoff

Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough.

~ Groucho Marx

I can't really tell how old I am, only that I'm too young to wonder if I asked the right questions in the past, and too old to wish the future will bring me all the answers.

~ Gabriel Bá

The glory of the elderly is long life with grey hair.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

May you live to be as old as 120 years old.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Once we were young, now we are adult.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Take care of the elderly people.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The older you get, the easier it is for you to distinguish between your friends and people you are not seeing for the first time.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Us women, no matter how crude we are with one another,we must always remember that we have two enemies in common.” The three of us look at each other confused, then back at Ms. Eleanor waiting for her to answer.“Men,” she sighs, still staring off. “And old age.

~ Chelsea Ballinger

To come across as younger than they are: Women buy creams that promise to slow aging, men buy fast cars.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The dream is possible at any age. Go live your dream.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

~ Saki

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.

~ Joseph G. Peterson

Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind and now it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs.

~ Diana Athill

Here's what I think: when you're born, you're assigned a brain like you're assigned a desk, a nice desk, with plenty of pigeonholes and drawers and secret compartments. At the start, it's empty, and then you spend your life filling it up. You're the only one who understands the filing system, you amass some clutter, sure, but somehow it works: you're asked the capital of Oregon, and you say Salem; you want to remember your first-grade teacher's name, and there it is, Miss Fox. Then suddenly you're old, and though everything's still in your brain, it's crammed so tight that when you try to remember the name of the guy who does the upkeep on your lawn, your first childhood crush comes fluttering out, or the persistent smell of tomato soup in a certain Des Moines neighborhood.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

~ Julian Barnes

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

~ Stewart O'nan

Do not forget you mother, when she is old.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.

~ Marcel Proust

Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.

~ Meghna Pant

Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.

~ Vera Nazarian

Aging is not our fault, but we certainly are guilty of feeling it.

~ Munia Khan

though aging reduces speed, it increases experience and understanding

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Youthful exuberance is splendid.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is no old age. There is, as there always was, only you.

~ Carol Grace

In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana