Wisdom in Aging: Finding Joy Through Old Age Quotes
Old age, typically starting around 65-70, entails physical and cognitive decline, though its effects vary. It may bring health issues like heart disease and dementia, yet offers opportunities for hobbies, travel, and relationships. Despite losses and challenges, it can also foster wisdom, perspective, and personal growth.
Old Age Quotes
1. “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.”
— David Mamet
2. “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”
— Victor Hugo
3. “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 a spectator.”
— Confucius
4. “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
5. “Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
6. “In youth, the days are short and the years are long. In old age, the years are short and days long.”
— Pope Paul VI
7. “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.”
— Francis Bacon
8. “Education is the best provision for old age.”
— Aristotle
9. “Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his
youth, he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself
an inmate.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
10. “Old age is a shipwreck.”
— Charles de Gaulle
11. “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.”
— Golda Meir
12. “I only seek in my old age to perfect that which I had not before
thoroughly learned in my youth because my sins were a hindrance to me.”
— Saint Patrick
13. “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.”
— Maurice Chevalier
14. “Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.”
— Mark Twain
15. “Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.”
— Muhammad Ali
16. “Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able
to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.”
— E. B. White
17. “Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful
and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by
employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few
regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”
— Louisa May Alcott
18. “It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with
life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a
destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Death does away with time.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
19. “Lack of education, old age, bad health, or discrimination –
these are causes of poverty, and the way to attack it is to go to the
root.”
— Robert Kennedy
20. “Many believe – and I believe – that I have been designated for
this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up; I
work out of love for God and I put all my hope in Him.”
— Michelangelo
21. “What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.”
— Jean-Paul
22. “Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.”
— Herman Melville
23. “Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
24. “A woman tells her doctor, ‘I’ve got a bad back.’ The doctor
says, ‘It’s old age.’ The woman says, ‘I want a second opinion.’ The
doctor says: ‘Okay – you’re ugly as well.’”
— Tommy Cooper
25. “Old age is when the liver spots show through your gloves.”
— Phyllis Diller
26. “We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.”
— Frank A. Clark
27. “Filth and old age, I’m sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity.”
— Geoffrey Chaucer
28. “All diseases run into one, old age.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
29. “Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.”
— Thomas Carlyle
30. “Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”
— Anne Bradstreet
31. “To be old is to be part of a huge and ordinary multitude… the
reason why old age was venerated in the past was that it was
extraordinary.”
— Ronald Blythe
32. “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
— Aldous Huxley
33. “Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not counting the years.”
— Ausonius
34. “Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.”
— Emily Dickinson
35. “When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that
you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age?
Everything else in marriage is transitory.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
36. “Preparation for old age should begin no later than one’s teens. A
life that is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled
on retirement.”
— Dwight L. Moody
37. “To me – old age is always ten years older than I am. Bernard
Baruch The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of
blessing previously secured.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
38. “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”
— Philip Roth
39. “Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.”
— George Sand
40. “In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.”
— Josh Billings
41. “Old age may have its limitations and challenges, but in spite of
them, our latter years can be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling
of our lives.”
— Billy Graham
42. “It is not well to make great changes in old age.”
— Charles Spurgeon
43. “Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that
it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the
rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but
the indifference of the soul.”
— Andre Maurois
44. “It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play
and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the
regrets into old age.”
— Margaret Mead
45. “To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent – that is to triumph over old age.”
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich
46. “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.”
— Robertson Davies
47. “Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.”
— Dorothy Canfield Fisher
48. “Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.”
— Leon Trotsky
49. “Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.”
— Regina Brett
50. “In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.”
— Knut Hamsun
51. “Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.”
— W. Somerset Maugham
52. “Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours, or
mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had
brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.”
— Hermann Hesse
53. “Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all
pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it
every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.”
— Giacomo Leopardi