Old Age and Ageing

Live your life and forget your age.

After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.

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

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel just as good as ever.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

Whatever a man’s age may be, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

They think that you bear old age more easily not because of the way you live but because you’re wealthy, for the wealthy, they say, have many consolations.

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.

Not only is the old man twice a child, but also the man who is drunk.

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older one climbs with surprising strides.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.