The Best Collection of Quotes about Aging

Old age is like everything else.  To make a success of it, you've got to start young.  -- Theodore Roosevelt

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. -- Mark Twain

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. -- Doris Lessing

There's always a lot to be thankful for if you take time to look for it. For example, I am sitting here thinking how nice it is that wrinkles don't hurt. -- Anonymous

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

You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing. -- Michael Pritchard

You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older. -- Anouk Aimee, O Magazine, October 2003

You can't hide your true colours as you approach the autumn of your life. -- Anonymous

At twenty we worry about what others think of us; at forty we don't care about what others think of us; at sixty we discover they haven't been thinking about us at all. -- Anonymous

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Do not resent growing old. Many are denied the privilege.-- Anonymous

Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old; it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother. -- Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you. -- Agatha Christie

I intend to live forever, or die trying. -- Groucho Marx

Old age is no place for sissies. -- Bette Davis

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.  -- Maurice Chevalier, New York Times, 9 October 1960

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. --Frank Lloyd Wright

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. -- Henry Ford

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are. -- Muhammed Ali

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. -- Abraham Lincoln

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.-- Daniel Francois Esprit Auber

If I'd known how old I was going to be I'd have taken better care of myself.  -- Adolph Zukor

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old. -- James A. Garfield

Grow old with me the best is yet to come. -- Robert Browning

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days. -- John Burroughs

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years. -- George William Curtis

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

Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.  -- Chili Davis

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.  -- Mark Twain, Following the Equator

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?  -- Satchel Paige

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.  -- Bob Hope

Everyone is the age of their heart.  -- Guatemalan Proverb

The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.  -- Judith Regan

Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman in the world, and it's wonderful that she didn't cut up her face. She addressed aging by picking up her chin and receiving the light in a better way. And she looked like a woman. She never tried to look like a girl. -- Sharon Stone

Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have. -- William Devane

Every industry is going to be affected (by the aging population). This creates tremendous opportunities and tremendous challenges. -- Pat Conroy

I am not afraid of aging, but more afraid of people's reactions to my aging. -- Barbara Hershey

I didn't want to let women down. One of the stereotypes I see breaking is the idea of aging and older women not being beautiful. -- Annie Leibovitz

I don't want to fight aging; I want to take good care of myself, but plastic surgery and all that? I'm not interested. -- Christine Lahti

I get all fired up about aging in America. -- Willard Scott

I think you have to relax about aging. What else can you do? -- Felicity Kendal

I'm not afraid of aging. -- Shelley Duvall

I've been going through photos of my mother, looking back on her life and trying to put it into context. Very few people age gracefully enough to be photographed through their aging. -- Jamie Lee Curtis

No one can avoid aging, but aging productively is something else. -- Katharine Graham

Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it. -- Jeanne Moreau

Stay out of the sun, because it is the worst thing in terms of aging. I'm very medical. I come from a medical family. -- Nicole Kidman

The aging and decreasing population is a serious problem in many developed countries today. In Japan's case, these demographic changes are taking place at a more rapid pace than any other country has ever experienced. -- Toshihiko Fukui

When I began my search for the perfect skin care to fight the aging process, I noticed that my sensitive skin was reacting horribly to any product I used.  -- Connie Sellecca

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. -- Aldous Huxley

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

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough. -- Groucho Marx

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles. -- Donald R. Perry Marquis

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball. -- Doug Larson

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations. -- Isaac Disraeli

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. -- Sophia Loren

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself. -- Tom Wilson  

At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgement. -- Benjamin Franklin

The golden age is before us, not behind us. -- Sallust

When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect -- but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate -- may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical -- always think for yourself.  -- Linus Pauling

Education is the best provision for the journey to old age. -- Aristotle

Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age. -- Anna Garlin Spencer

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. -- Albert Einstein

I want to die young at a ripe old age. -- Ashley Montagu

First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful. -- Lady Diana Cooper

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.-- Henry David Thoreau

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members. -- Pearl S. Buck

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young -- or slender. -- William James

Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age. -- Jeanne Moreau

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you. -- Agatha Christie

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young. -- Sir Arthur Pinero

Live your life and forget your age. -- Norman Vincent Peale

In his later years Pablo Picasso was not allowed to roam an art gallery unattended, for he had previously been discovered in the act of trying to improve on one of his old masterpieces. -- Unknown

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred. -- Thomas Alva Edison

Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese. -- Billie Burke

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women? -- Harriet Beecher Stowe

All would live long, but none would be old. -- Benjamin Franklin

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man. -- Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile,1935

Old age is fifteen years older than I am. (also attributed to Bernard Baruch in slightly different form) -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else. -- Ogden Nash

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age: first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death. -- Cicero

I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past. -- Thomas Jefferson

Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. -- Florida Scott-Maxwell

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose! -- Alice James

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel. -- Elizabeth Arden

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. -- H. L. Mencken

A woman has the age she deserves. -- Coco Chanel

You only hurt yourself when you're not expanding and growing. Many people can't stand the thought of aging, but it's the crystallized thought patterns and inflexible mind-sets that age people before their time. You can break through and challenge your crystallized patterns and mind-sets. That's what evolution and the expansion of love are really about. -- Sara Paddison, The Hidden Power of the Heart

Age mellows some people; others it makes rotten. -- Heard in Arkansas

Men grow old, pearls grow yellow, there is no cure for it. -- Chinese Proverb

The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines. -- Plato

Old age comes at a bad time. -- San Banducci

Age is an ugly thing, and it goes on getting worse. -- Diana Cooper

Life is half spent before we know what it is. -- Herbert, 1651

Few people know how to be old. -- François de la Rochefoucauld

If youth knew; if age could. -- Henri Estienne

Never too old to learn. -- Latin proverb

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, Paregra und Paralipomena

By the time we've made it, we've had it.  -- Malcolm Forbes, The Capitalist Handbook

The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done. -- Richard Needham

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age. -- Sinclair Lewis

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do. -- Andrew Carnegie

The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer. -- Joan Collins

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with you. -- Harold Coffin

Consider well the proportion of things. It is better to be a young June bug, than an old bird of paradise. -- Mark Twain

When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.  -- Marty Bucella

In youth we run into difficulties; in old age difficulties run into us. -- Josh Billings

We are only young once. That is all society can stand. -- Bob Bowen

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity. -- Helen Rowland

You know you are getting old when the candles cost more than the cake. -- Bob Hope

It is sad to grow old but nice to ripen. -- Brigitte Bardot

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity. -- Mark Twain

Find an aim in life before you run out of ammunition. -- Arnold Glasow

A woman's always younger than a man of equal years. -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act. -- Truman Capote

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. -- Tom Stoppard OR Paulo Coelho

You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old. -- George Burns

All diseases run into one - old age. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age. -- Aristotle

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty the youth of old age. -- Victor Hugo OR Hosea Ballou

He has a profound respect for old age, especially when it's bottled. -- Gene Fowler

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age. -- Lucille Ball

I don't feel old. I don't feel anything till noon. That's when it's time for a nap. -- Bob Hope

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long. -- Pope Paul VI

At sixteen, I was stupid, confused and indecisive.  At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing and assertive.  At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive.  Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence? -- Jules Feiffer

No man is ever old enough to know better. -- Holbrook Jackson

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm, once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do about it. -- Golda Meir

So people think I'm lying about my age all the time? It's the records that are wrong. -- Calista Flockhart

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood. -- Logan Pearsall Smith

There is still no cure for the common birthday. -- John Glenn

We pay when old for the excesses of youth. -- J.B.Priestley

When you become senile, you won't know it. -- Bill Cosby

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. -- George Bernard Shaw

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

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals. -- Benjamin Franklin

We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing. -- Benjamin Franklin

The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five; the mind is at its best about the age of forty-nine. -- Aristotle

In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied. -- Rowan D. Williams

No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special, and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning. -- Barbara de Angelis

As we advance in life it becomes more and more difficult, but in fighting the difficulties the inmost strength of the heart is developed. -- Vincent van Gogh

Youth has no age. -- Pablo Picasso

Among all my patients in the second half of life ... there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. -- Carl Jung

There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow. -- Edith Wharton

The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children. -- Clarence Darrow

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. -- Robert Frost

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy. -- Helen Hayes

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. --Madeleine L'Engle

There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach this stage of wisdom. -- Cornelia Otis Skinner

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. -- Adrienne Rich

About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age. -- Gloria Pitzer

Inside every older person is a younger person – wondering what the hell happened. -- Cora Harvey Armstrong

Age is a number and mine is unlisted. -- Anonymous

When I turned two I was really anxious, because I’d doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I’m six I'll be 90.  -- Steve Wright

Live as long as you may. The first twenty years are the longest half of your life. -- Robert Southey

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest. -- Father Larry Lorenzoni

Men are like wine: some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age. -- Pope John XXIII

Few women admit their age. Few men act theirs. -- Anonymous

After 30, a body has a mind of its own. -- Bette Midler

I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do. -- Phyllis Diller

Looking fifty is great – if you’re sixty. -- Joan Rivers

Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

Like many women my age, I am 28 years old. -- Mary Schmich

Birthdays are nature’s way of telling us to eat more cake. -- Anonymous

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not. -- Mark Twain

When she got older, she could remember anything, whether it really happened or not. -- Angela Gentile

To be pro-age, you don't need to be anti-youth.  -- Angela Gentile

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself. -- Eubie Blake

You are only young once, but you can be immature for a lifetime. -- John P. Grier

It is a rare and difficult attainment to grow old gracefully and happily.  -- Lydia Maria Francis Child

Perfect love sometimes does not come till the first grandchild. -- Welsh Proverb.

The best thing that can happen to a couple married 50 years or more is that they both grown nearsighted.  -- Linda Fiterman

Age does not protect you from love.  But, love, to some extent, protects you from age. -- Jeanne Moreau

The heart has no wrinkles. -- Mme de Sevigne

An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her. -- Agatha Christie, 1954

Old people have dreams, too. -- John Glenn (72), after his safe return to Earth.

Old is beautiful. -- Maggie Kuhn of the Gray Panthers.

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age. -- Lydia M. Child

Some old people are driving vehicles right now and don’t even know it. -- Anonymous

It’s tough to lose weight when you’re older. By then, your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends. -- Anonymous

So far, this is the oldest I’ve ever been. -- Anonymous

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. -- Samuel Ullman

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned. -- Judith Viorst

Old age needs so little but needs that little so much. -- Margaret Willour

The whole business of marshaling one's energies becomes more and more important as one grows older. -- Hume Cronyn

A woman's always younger than a man of equal years. -- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. -- Henri Frederic Amiel

I've never known a person who lives to 110 who is remarkable for anything else. -- Josh Billings

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world. -- Lydia M. Child

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young. -- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me. -- Thomas Jefferson

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week. - 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

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life. -- Margaret Mead

We are not limited by our old ages; we are liberated by it. -- Stu Mittleman

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character. -- Ralph B. Perry

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed. -- Anthony Powell

Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed. -- Charles M. Schultz

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. -- Abraham Sutzkever

The person of wisdom is the person of years. -- Edward

Age is only a number. -- Lexi Starling

I want to die young at a ripe old age. -- Ashley Montagu

Old age comes at a bad time. -- San Banducci

Aging will create the music of the coming century. -- Betty Friedan

Aging is not "lost youth", but a new stage of opportunity and strength. -- Betty Friedan (1921-2006)

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth. -- Betty Friedan

It's a different stage of life, and if you are going to pretend it's youth, you are going to miss it. You are going to miss the surprises, the possibilities, and the evolution that we are just beginning to know about because there are n role models and there are no guideposts and there are no signs. -- Betty Friedan

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves. -- Betty Friedan

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. -- Joan Didion

Time is the school in which we learn".  -- Joan Didion

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.  -- G. Norman Collie

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.  -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's important to have a twinkle in your wrinkle.  -- Anonymous

When I can look Life in the eyes, Grown calm and very coldly wise, Life will have given me the Truth, And taken in exchange - my youth.  -- Sara Teasdale

Who does not wish to be beautiful, and clever, and rich, and to have back, in old age, the time spent trying to be any of them.  -- Robert Brault

I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every second years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.  -- Dave Barry

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.  -- Frances Bacon

To know how to grow old is the mater-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living. -- Henri Amiel

We've put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.  -- Frank A. Clark

First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.  -- Leo Rosenberg

The tragedy of old is not that one is old, but that one is young.  -- Oscard Wild, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

It is possible at any age to discover a lifelong desire you never knew you had.  -- Robert Brault

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.  -- Saint Aurelius Augustine

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.  You are always being asked to do more and yet you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down. -- T.S. Eliot, 1950

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.  -- Charles Dickens

From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.  -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained.  By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth.  -- Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

Everything slows down with age, except the time it takes cake and ice cream to reach your hips.  -- Attributed to John Wagner

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.  -- Oliver W. Holmes, Sr.

As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative Mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.  -- Erma Bombeck

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.  -- Ogden Nash

They say that age is all in your mind.  The trick is keeping it from creeping down into your body.  -- Anonymous

The other day a man asked me what I thought was the best time of life.  "Why", I answered without a thought, "Now." -- David Grayson

Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.  -- Anonymous

One of the best parts of growing older?  You can flirt all you like since you've become harmless.  -- Liz Smith

We turn not older with years, but newer every day. -- Emily Dickinson

Middle age is when a narrow waist and a broad mind begin to change places. -- Anonymous

Middle age is youth without its levity, and age without decay.  -- Daniel Defoe

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all things that make you want to live to be a hundred.  -- Allen

I don't do alcohol anymore - I get the same effect just standing up fast.  -- Anonymous

I'm not 40, I'm eighteen with 22 years experience.  -- Anonymous

Age is a slowing down of everything except fear. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy. -- Anonymous

Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, diseases seek men. -- Chinese Proverb

Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It's more often a succession of jerks. --Jean Rhys

Age attacks when we least expect it. -- Carrie Latet

We are always the same age inside. -- Gertrude Stein

Old age ain't no place for sissies. -- Bette Davis

Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that'll get you home earlier. -- Dan Bennett

I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death. -- William Allen White

Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines. -- Edward Young, Night Thoughts

Don't let aging get you down. It's too hard to get back up. -- Attributed to John Wagner

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M.D. after them. --Arnold Palmer

You spend 90% of your adult life hoping for a long rest and the last 10% trying to convince the Lord that you're actually not that tired. -- Robert Brault

It's hard to feel middle-aged, because how can you tell how long you are going to live? -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened. --Jennifer Yane

Middle age is when we can do just as much as ever - but would rather not. -- Anonymous

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage - so long are you young. When the wires are all down and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old. -- Douglas MacArthur

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. -- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. -- Ambrose Bierce

The elderly don't drive that badly; they're just the only ones with time to do the speed limit. --Jason Love

It's a mere moment in a man's life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers' Game. -- Vin Scully

All diseases run into one, old age. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart. -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Middle age: The time when you'll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you. -- Robert Quillen

Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces. -- Michel de Montaigne

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. -- Mark Twain

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once. -- Dave Barry, "Your Disintegrating Body," 1990

The true way to render age vigorous is to prolong the youth of the mind. -- Mortimer Collins

A man is as old as he's feeling, a woman as old as she looks. -- Mortimer Collins

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. -- Henry Ford

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all. --Jawaharlal Nehru

Sometimes age succeeds, sometimes it fails. It depends on you. -- Ravensara Noite

The best thing about getting old is that all those things you couldn't have when you were young you no longer want. -- L.S. McCandless

I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it. -- Bernard Berenson

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work. -- Anonymous

We thought we were running away from the grown-ups, and now we're the grown-ups. --Margaret Atwood

You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older. -- Lillian Gish

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old. -- Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711

It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was. -- Seigneur de Saint-Evremond, 1696

Age is like the newest version of a software - it has a bunch of great new features but you lost all the cool features the original version had. -- Carrie Latet

When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn't play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again. -- Hugo L. Black

In youth we are plagued by desire; in later years, by the desire to feel desire. -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age. -- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left. It is called hunting for your spectacles. -- Edward Grey

Regular naps prevent old age, especially if you take them while driving. -- Anonymous

I don't know how you feel about old age... but in my case I didn't even see it coming. It hit me from the rear. -- Phyllis Diller

Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form. -- Andre Maurois

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

You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again. -- Bonnie Prudden

The trick is growing up without growing old. -- Casey Stengel

It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are. -- Quoted by Raymond A. Michel in The Leaf

The answer to old age is to keep one's mind busy and to go on with one's life as if it were interminable. I always admired Chekhov for building a new house when he was dying of tuberculosis. -- Leon Edel

The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face. -- Jack Nicklaus

Middle age is when your classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you -- Bennett Cerf

I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little. -- Sheila Kaye-Smith

There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone; but years after, we know it was much later. -- Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to. -- Bill Vaughn

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much. -- Margaret Willour

The idea is to die young as late as possible. -- Ashley Montagu

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest. -- Marilyn Fergus, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 1980.

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.  -- Edith Wharton (1892-1937)

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.  -- Lauren Bacall

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.  -- James Broughton

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.  -- Confucius

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

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.  -- Stanislaw Lee

Age is opportunity no less than youth itself.  -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Age is no barrier.  It's a limitation you put on your mind.  -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Every day you make progress.  Every step may be fruitful.  Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever ascending, ever-improving path.  You know you will never get to the end of the journey.  But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the job and glory of the climb.  -- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.  -- Douglas MacArthur

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.  -- John Barrymore

The soul never ages.  My soul dances without my feet.  I am the music.  -- Alev Oguz

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty.  Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.  -- Franz Kafka

We don't beat the reaper by living longer.  We beat the reaper by living fully. -- Randy Pausch, 2007



This list was compiled by Angela G. Gentile.