123 Quotes Tagged: aging

It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier — and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more.

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome. The remains of it are still visible through the rifts of time.

The ageing process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball

The transformation of a gilded playboy into a multinational titan did not surprise me. Age does not affect the taste for trophies, and flagging physical vigor is often compensated for by a fresh psychological drive. [...] In his fifties, a man’s virility often goes into action to build up a capital of power as a shelter against glandular decline.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

I'm growing fonder of my staff;
I'm growing dimmer in my eyes;
I'm growing fainter in my laugh;
I'm growing deeper in my sighs;
I'm growing careless of my dress;
I'm growing frugal of my gold;
I'm growing wise; I'm growing — yes, — I'm growing old.

Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this

...they say that when you get old, as I am, your body slows down. I don't believe it. No, I think that is quite wrong. I have a theory that you do not slow down at all, but that life slows down for you. You understand me? Everything becomes languid, as it were, and you can notice so much more when things sre in slow motion. The things you see! The extraordinary things that happen all around you, that you never even suspected before. It really is a delightful adventure, quite delightful.

Grow old along with me — the best is yet to be,

Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.