Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
- When life's summer grows to winter
- And its roses fade and fall;
- When in vain we try to hinder
- Death's commissioned right to all;
- When on white lips there's a last kiss
- And we see her face no more,
- Then it is to know what love is,
- Waiting on a foreign shore.
EDWIN LEIBFREED, "'Tis Then We Know"
Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Women are beautiful when they're young, and not after. Men can still preserve their sex appeal well into old age.... Some men can maintain, if they embrace it ... cragginess, weary masculinity. Women just get old and fat and wrinkly.
TRACY LETTS, August: Osage Country
Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babies; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.
The habits of a young man are, like his coat, removable; the habits of an old man are like the drapery of a statue.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
- I grow old ... I grow old ...
- I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and Roses… Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who sang "Auld Lang Syne" and howled with sentiment, and more than once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic tears?
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH, Trivia
Old age ought to be, and essentially is a manifestation of what is hidden in the depths of man's nature. It might be, it should be, not an exhibition of crackling impotence and gloomy decay, but the very crown and ripening of life--the symbol of maturity, not of dissolution.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The only real change in life comes with the consciousness of old age.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
We have confidence in an old man when holding a position, but lack confidence in him when he is applying for one.
Until thirty we live through curiosity, after that out of sheer spite and bravado.
ABRAHAM MILLER, Unmoral Maxims
It must be confessed that life after forty is an anti-climax, gradual indeed, and progressive with some, but steep and rapid with others. It would be well if old age diminished our perceptibilities to pain, in the same proportion that it does our sensibilities to pleasure; and if life has been termed a feast, those favoured few are the most fortunate guests, who are not compelled to sit at the table, when they can no longer partake of the banquet.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
T. S. ELIOT, Time Magazine, Oct. 23, 1950
The old are apt to mistake age for experience, and to imagine they are privileged to give good advice, though they may have lived only to afford bad example.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
People often say to themselves in life that they should avoid a variety of occupation, and, more particularly, be the less willing to enter upon new work the older they grow. But it is easy to talk, easy to give advice to oneself and others. To grow old is itself to enter upon a new business; all the circumstances change, and a man must either cease acting altogether, or willingly and consciously take over the new rôle.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Before forty we live forwards; after forty we live backwards.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM, The Maxims of Marmaduke
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