“Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.”
“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.”
“Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.”
“I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.”
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
“In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.”
“Rejoice that you have still have a long time to live, before the thought comes to you that there is nothing more in the world to see.”
“The short bloom of our brief and narrow life flies far away. While we are calling for flowers and wine and woman, old age is upon us.”
“Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.”
“A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, ''At my age, I don't even buy green bananas.”
“Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ''Why not?'' and the other, ''Why bother?''”
“When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.”
“Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.”
“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”
“Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold and have escaped, not from one master, but from many.”
“Old age is not a disease -- it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.”
“Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.”
“To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.”
“At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths --your abilities and your failings.”
“In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.”
“My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.”
“Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.”
“You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.”
“It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.”
“Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.”
“At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.”
“At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.”
“O Time and change! -- with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!”
“Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.”
“Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.”