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  • To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent--that is to triumph over old age.
    * Thomas Bailey Aldrich


  • To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
    * Bernard Baruch


  • I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
    * Truman Capote


  • Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
    * George Chapman


  • The young always have the same problem-- how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
    * Quentin Crisp


  • Father Time is not always a hard parent, and, though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigour. With such people the grey head is but the impression of the old fellow's hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.
    * Charles Dickens


  • By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.
    * Marie Dressler


  • 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.
    * T. S. Eliot


  • What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind--the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
    * George Eliot


  • If youth but knew; if age but could.
    * Henri Estienne


  • Human life is a continuous thread which each of us spins to his own pattern, rich and complex in meaning. There are no natural knots in it. Yet knots form, nearly always in adolescence.
    * Edgar Z. Friedenberg


  • Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
    * Goethe


  • It's not that age brings childhood back again,
    Age merely shows what children we remain.
    * Goethe


  • Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.
    * Jane Harrison


  • Old age equalizes--we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
    * Eric Hoffer


  • The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.
    * Victor Hugo


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


  • So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
    * Samuel Johnson


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


  • The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
    * Doris Lessing


  • Age is opportunity no less
    Than youth itself, though in another dress,
    And as the evening twilight fades away
    The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
    * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


  • It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
    * W. Somerset Maugham


  • By the time a man notices that he is no longer young, his youth has long since left him.
    * François Mauriac


  • Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
    * Thomas Moore


  • Youth has no age.
    * Pablo Picasso


  • Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
    * V. S. Pritchett


  • An old man loved is winter with flowers.
    * German Proverb


  • The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
    * George Santayana


  • A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
    * John Steinbeck


  • When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
    * I. F. Stone


  • The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
    * Henry David Thoreau


  • Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.
    * Mark Twain


  • Youth, large, lusty, loving--Youth, full of grace, force, fascination.
    Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
    * Walt Whitman


  • The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
    * Oscar Wilde


  • Those whom the gods love grow young.
    * Oscar Wilde


  • In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
    * Oscar Wilde


  • These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
    * Virginia Woolf