Old Quotes

Age and treachery will triumph over youth and skill.

~ Anonymous

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so would I?

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

All would live long but none would be old.

~ Benjamin Franklin

An old man concludeth from his knowing mankind that they know him too and that maketh him very wary.

~ George Saville

An old man loved is Winter with flowers.

~ German Proverb

An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

But Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age alias! that al wole envenyme Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon ther is namoore to telle The bren as I best kan now most I selle.

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Grow old with me! The best is yet to be The last of life for which the first was made: Our times are in his hands Who sayeth a whole I plant Youth shows but half Trust God see all nor be afraid.

~ Robert Browning

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

~ Anthony Powell

I am 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were 15 months in every year I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women for example I think they deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.

~ James Thurber

I am just turning 40 and taking my time about it.

~ Harold Lloyd

I haven't asked you to make me young again. All I want is to go on getting older.

~ Konrad Adenauer

I refuse to admit that I am more than 52 even if that makes my sons illegitimate.

~ Nancy Lady Astor

If I'd known I was gonna live this long (100 years) I'd have taken better care of myself.

~ James Hubert Blake

If the young only knew if the old only could.

~ French Saying

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

~ William Shakespeare

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden deaths do.

~ Richard Hughes

Old age is the Outpatient's Dept of purgatory.

~ Lord Cecil

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

~ Gerald Brenan

The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.

~ T. S. Eliot

The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual.

~ Jacques Bainville

There is many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

~ Old Saying

Time goes by: reputation increases ability declines.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

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

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty interest after interest attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

~ William Hazlitt

Wrinkles - the service stripes of life.

~ Anonymous

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

~ Arnold Bennett

The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

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

~ Ogden Nash

No Spring nor Summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one Autumnal face.

~ John Donne

If you live long enough the venerability factor creeps in you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.

~ I. F. Stone

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

~ Voltaire

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

~ Andri Maurois

Old age is an island surrounded by death.

~ Juan Montalvo

It is time to be old To take in sail.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I feel age like an icicle down my back.

~ Dyson Carter

Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

~ Igor Stravinsky

Dignity high station or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men in order to keep the younger at a distance who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

~ Jonathan Swift

The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.

~ T. S. Eliot