The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

I am a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.

If I am a fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

A young man who is unable to commit a folly is already an old man.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

Everything hangs on one's thinking...A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

Here a while back I heard a preacher talking on the radio about the peacefulness of the old, and I thought to myself, 'You ignorant man!' I'm ninety-four years old and I have never yet had any peace, to speak of. My mind is just a turmoil of regrets. It's not what I did that I regret, it's what I didn't do. Except for the bottle, I always walked the straight and narrow; a family man, a good provider, never cut up, never did ugly, and I regret it. In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what's the result? I had two wives, good, Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face on that woman so clear it hurts, and there's never a day passes I don't think about her, and there's never a day passes I don't curse myself. 'What kind of a timid, dried-up, weevily fellow were you?' I say to myself. 'You should've said to hell with what's right and what's wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You'd have something to remember, you'd be happier now.' She's out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she's been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.

Life is indeed terribly complicated — to a man who has lost his principles.

He is young but he thinks old.

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.