Quotes to inspire and reflect

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.

Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colors!

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

What [Time] hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

Nobody loves life like an old man.

Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

No one's so old that he mayn’t with decency hope for one more day.

What does long life avail? The best seats at the funerals of friends.

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad foundations.

Old men, for the most part, are like old chronicles that give you dull but true accounts of times past, and are worth knowing only on that score.

Old men grasp more at life than babies, and leave it with a much worse grace than young people. It is because all their labours having been for this life, they perceive at last their trouble lost.

Senescence begins / And middle age ends / The day your descendents / Out-number your friends.

The old men know when an old man dies.

Tis well for old age that it is always accompanied with want of perception, ignorance, and a facility of being deceived. For should we see how we are used and would not acquiesce, what would become of us?

Here’s a song was never sung: / Growing old is dying young.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

Wiser in relish, if sedate, / Come graybeards to their roses late.

Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour / Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, / Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

Age is rarely despised but when it is contemptible.

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

Our years / Glide silently away. No tears, / No loving orisons repair / The wrinkled cheek, the whitening hair/That drop forgotten to the tomb.

It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, any more than they grow stronger or healthier or honester.

As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence.

Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.

Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, / And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins.

It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.

I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.

The power of love itself weakens ahd gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.

An old goat is never the more reverend for his beard.

Old age is not / a total misery. Experience helps.

Oftener than not the old are uncontrollable; / Their tempers make them difficult to deal with.

Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.

Alas, how right the ancient saying is: / We, who are old, are nothing else but noise / And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, / And have no wits, although we think us wise.

We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.

Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our times are in His hand / Who saith “A whole I planned, / Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor he afraid!'

Old men are always young enough to learn, with profit.

Beyond age, leaf / withered, man goes three footed / no stronger than a child is, / a dream that falters in daylight.

Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.

Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.