My birthday's coming up, and so I thought I'd think about aging a bit. You can too:
We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Though an old man I am but a young gardener.
Thomas Jefferson
Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.
Whitney Young
The old begin to complain of the conduct of the young when they themselves are no longer able to set a bad example.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.
Thomas Jefferson
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
Pearl S. Buck
No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather
All would live long, but none would be old.
Benjamin Franklin
There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
Edith Wharton
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken
It is easy to believe that life is long and one's gifts are vast -- easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.
Alfred Adler
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
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.
Pearl S. Buck
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.
Cornelius Otis Skinner
Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.
Dr. Johnson
How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young -- or slender.
William James
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
Pearl S. Buck
It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!
Alice James
Being an old maid is like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation after you have ceased struggling.
Edna Ferber
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
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather
I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
Elizabeth Arden
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
I want to die young at a ripe old age.
Ashley Montagu
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
A woman has the age she deserves.
Coco Chanel
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next.
Pearl S. Buck
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
Helen Hayes
It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance its allotted length.
Helen Keller
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age.
Jeanne Moreau
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
First you are young; then you are middle-aged; then you are old; then you are wonderful.
Lady Diana Cooper
There's no pleasure on earth that's worth sacrificing for the sake of an extra five years in the geriatric ward of the Sunset Old People's Home, Weston-Super-Mare.
Horace Rumpole
Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.
Maurice Chevalier
Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
Robert Frost
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
Live your life and forget your age.
Norman Vincent Peale
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
Sir Arthur Pinero
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
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
I see no comfort in outliving one's friends, and remaining a mere monument of the times which are past.
Thomas Jefferson
In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.
Lionel Trilling
The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.
Madeleine L'Engle
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
Henry David Thoreau
Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
Ogden Nash
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
Trotsky
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.
Virginia Woolf
