Old Age Quotes - Page 3

They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him.

The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.

If an eighty-six-year-old woman has been clear-seeing from a young age, she will have gone through a lot of life developing a keen eye for snares and pitfalls, an ear for deceit, and a good nose for knavery. And by such an age, a smart woman with no illusions is one to whom courage comes far more readily than it does to those young people who don't yet know the world for what it is.

When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.

If you assume that the new - and simply because it's new - is always to be better than the old, chances are you've never known anything valuable.

Age is only a number. Keep an active life.

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don't care. Old is when you don't want to dance anymore. Old is when you don't want to learn anything new except how to be old. Old is when people tell you that you are old-and you believe them.

I would die for you, my love—in old age.

If I were offering hip replacement services I'd use Jarod Kintz as my spokesman. No one can possibly be better than him, to replace the missing spoke in your wheels.

If you don't do anything stupid when you're young, you won't remember something funny when you're old.

A person gets built and stands for a few years and then nature’s demolition team comes in.

The Little Boy and the Old ManSaid the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."Said the old man, "I do that too."The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."I do that too," laughed the little old man.Said the little boy, "I often cry."The old man nodded, "So do I."But worst of all," said the boy, "it seemsGrown-ups don't pay attention to me."And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.I know what you mean," said the little old man.

And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing some extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable.

The good thing about being old is not being young.

Keep the enthusiasm of your youth and treasure the wisdom of old age.

Older age has taught one crucial lesson about life. It has taught me that regardless of where I've been I still have much to see and despite every fall I still haven't experienced it all.

DisciplineI am old and I have hadmore than my share of good and bad.I've had love and sorrow, seen sudden deathand been left alone and of love bereft.I thought I would never love againand I thought my life was grief and pain.The edge between life and death was thin, but then I discovered discipline.I learned to smile when I felt sad, I learned to take the good and the bad, I learned to care a great deal morefor the world about me than before.I began to forget the "Me" and "I"and joined in life as it rolled by: this may not mean sheer ecstasybut is better by far than "I" and "Me.

Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it. Fruits are most welcome when almost over; youth is most charming at its close; the last drink delights the toper, the glass which souses him and puts the finishing touch on his drunkenness. Each pleasure reserves to the end the greatest delights which it contains. Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too lateTill the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.Cato learned Greek at eighty; SophoclesWrote his grand Oedipus, and SimonidesBore off the prize of verse from his compeers,When each had numbered more than fourscore years,And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,Had but begun his Characters of Men.Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,Completed Faust when eighty years were past,These are indeed exceptions; but they showHow far the gulf-stream of our youth may flowInto the arctic regions of our lives.Where little else than life itself survives.

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

Moderation is the key to old age and the doorway to boredom

It's strange how in childhood it feels like tomorrow won't come until the end of forever, but in adulthood it feels like the end of forever could come tomorrow.

Once we were young, now we are adult.

A man of forty-five can consider himself still young till the moment comes when he realises that he has children old enough to fall in love.

Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.

The natural heat, say the good-fellows,first seats itself in the feet: that concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middleregion, where it makes a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end, like a vapor that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress.

How naive and foolish the young are to imagine that they understand the loneliness of great age, the outliving of your contemporaries, anyone to whom your century of memory might make any sense.

We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful.

In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.

Gray hair is the glory of a long life.

One's own yesterday is a ghost that will not be laid down.

Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.

Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.

Late-Flowering LustMy head is bald, my breath is bad,Unshaven is my chin,I have not now the joys I hadWhen I was young in sin.I run my fingers down your dressWith brandy-certain aimAnd you respond to my caressAnd maybe feel the same.But I've a picture of my ownOn this reunion night,Wherein two skeletons are shewnTo hold each other tight;Dark sockets look on emptinessWhich once was loving-eyed,The mouth that opens for a kissHas got no tongue inside.I cling to you inflamed with fearAs now you cling to me,I feel how frail you are my dearAnd wonder what will be--A week? or twenty years remain?And then--what kind of death?A losing fight with frightful painOr a gasping fight for breath?Too long we let our bodies cling,We cannot hide disgustAt all the thoughts that in us springFrom this late-flowering lust.

I unwrapped my love for her like one might unwrap leftovers. Gotta eat up the old stuff first, as a cannibal might say in a retirement home.

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.

Grandchildren are their grandparents' toys.

I don't see why there should be a point where everyone decides you're too old. I'm not too old, and until I decide I'm too old I'll never be too fucking old.

Real vision dies only when life dies. Once we live, we hope, we yearn for and we aspire to have something!

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.

I wrapped my hands around the familiar cup and tried to draw strength from it. It was from Thea's old Moss Rose set, remnant of careful scrimping and saving in her first year of marriage. Yet the mellow old cup now brought me no comfort, only a feeling of helplessness, of time slipping away. Sunday-best dishes gone to everyday and now to mismatched pieces. Like Thea and me

We can never skip growing old. As we grow older, we understand old things and things of old times better!

When the years are dying in the arms of your life,the earth is in pain moving around the sun.

With regard to things such as independence, mental capabilities, and sexuality, a very old man is nothing but a gigantic infant with white hair and wrinkles.

Take care of the elderly people.

They say that as one grows older one mellows, become more tolerant. Perhaps. Sometimes I think it is more a stripping off, a peeling away of irrelevancies. But somehwere in youth, as childhood is left behind, certain truths about ourselves become apparent, and once we recognise them, we must abide by them.

Now, it’s time for me to lock up and go. Listen to me. Lock up an empty building that’s gonna be torn down. Makes no sense. Like an old man tellin’ a lie to his son from his death bed. What’s the point? Who besides yourself are you fooling?

One of the first steps to successful leadership is to forget your age and remember your dream.

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals.

Getting older comes with abilities. Being old comes with disabilities.

When your youth is about to enter in old age it shouldn't wonder, what happened? it must say, well done.

We grow old judging othersAnd ourselvesUntil life humbles usAnd makes scared children of usLonging to hold another’s handTo hear their kind words And witness their kind deeds done on our behalf.But like children,We sabotage everythingFor nothing satisfies usUntil life crumbles usAnd we are no more.

You can not have empty or neutral mind, as long as you work the mind will contain dreams, if you stop working it will contain regrets.

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.

They say marry the person with whom you are the closest to, the guy with whom you can share your 3 am thoughts with, sitting on a rooftop and discussing random things like why cavemen were hirsute or why the earth isn’t a square. The genie who knows what you want before you open your mouth. The angel who reads your mind before you can articulate your thoughts. The friend you can laugh and cry with. The brother whose arms are safer than any amount of security and protection the outside world can provide you. The parent that will support you through thick and thin, no matter what. The soul whose love for them in the river of your heart will never dilute, even when the currents get rough, and the waters, dark. The fellow who would tell you that he loves you every night and spend the day proving it through little gestures that speak much louder than any words of love. The person with whom you can hold hands when you turn eighty and announce to the world- ‘we made it!

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another.

And then I laugh, because it's so ridiculous and so gorgeous and it's all I an do to not melt into a fit of giggles. So what if I'm ninety-three? So what if I'm ancient and cranky and my body's a wreck? If they're willing to accept me and my guilty conscience, why the hell shouldn't I run away with the circus? It's like Charlie told the cop. For this old man, this IS home.