Selected age quotes

1. How old are you? Sixteen? S-seventeen? [asks security guard] Is seventeen legal?

2. The surest sign of age is loneliness.

3. The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.

4. Education is the best provision for old age.

5. Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

6. Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

7. Oh roses for the flush of youth, And laurel for the perfect prime; But pluck an ivy branch for me Grown old before my time.

8. In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.

9. I have tried... believe me, I have tried to like rap music. It makes me feel so very, very old. I have tried to get home with the downies.

10. Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.

11. In youth, what disappointments of our own making: in age, what disappointments from the nature of things.

12. The man of wisdom is the man of years.

13. Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

14. It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

15. A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches the age of 50, and a fool if he doesn't afterward.

16. Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.

17. The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

18. My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.

19. All that I know I learned after I was thirty.

20. We are always the same age inside.

21. As one gets older, litigation replaces sex.

22. Age is not important unless you're a cheese.

23. The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

24. The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

25. Well, a younger woman is a type, but not necessarily a type for me. And what is a younger woman? I mean, I'm pretty old. Almost everyone is younger.

26. Is not old wine wholesomest, old pippins toothsomest, old wood burn brightest, old linen wash whitest? Old soldiers, sweethearts, are surest, and old lovers are soundest.

27. No wise man ever wished to be younger.

28. My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

29. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

30. Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

31. My hair is grey, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single night, As men's have grown from sudden fears.

32. 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.

33. Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

34. You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career.

35. Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.

36. Age considers; youth ventures.

37. Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

38. Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

39. Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

40. I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.

41. Why do you think that at 67 I would start a career as a dictator ?

42. I came to serve you at the age of 28 and now I have not a hair on me that is not white, and my body is infirm and exhausted. All that was left to me and my brothers has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, without hearing or trial, to my great dishonor.

43. When she and Clare Boothe Luce were entering a room, Clare hung back, saying, 'Age before beauty'; Dorothy entered saying 'Pearls before swine.'

44. When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.

45. He undertook to disparage my age, when he himself had appointed his five-year-old son.

46. Les vieillards aiment a donner de bons preceptes, pour se consoler de n'etre plus en etat de donner de mauvais exemples.

47. Is it not clear that with all this we are bound to feel ill at ease in an age that likes to claim the distinction of being the most humane, the mildest, and the most righteous age that the sun has ever seen? It is bad enough that precisely when we hear these beautiful words we have the ugliest suspicions. What we find in them is merely an expression - and a masquerade - of a profound weakening, of weariness, of old age, of declining energies. What can it matter to us what tinsel the sick may use to cover up their weakness? Let them parade it as their virtue; after all, there is no doubt that weakness makes one mild, oh so mild, so righteous, so inoffensive, so 'humane'!

48. Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.

49. Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

50. Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

51. Although it is generally known, I think it's about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.

52. A man's only as old as the woman he feels.

53. I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

54. As a man and a father I look at the age of 28 to 38 as being an incredible period to go through and he was robbed of that. From my own personal experience I just thought how unbelievably tragic it is. It's shocking.

55. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

56. Your heart is as fresh as your face; and that is well. The useless men are those who never change with the years. Many views that I held to in my youth and long afterwards are a pain to me now, and I am carrying away from Thrums memories of errors into which I fell at every stage of my ministry. When you are older you will know that life is a long lesson in humility.

57. 'In twenty years,' I said, smiling at her tears, 'a man grows humble, Mary. I have stored within me a great fund of affection, with nobody to give it to, and I swear to you, on the word of a soldier, that if there is one of those ladies who can be got to care for me I shall be very proud.' Despite her semblance of delight I knew that she was wondering at me, and I wondered at myself, but it was true.

58. Marilyn Monroe: What about the difference in our ages?

59. Jack: Oh, it's not that big a difference. You're twenty-five and I'm thirty-nine.

60. Marilyn Monroe: I know, Jack. But what about twenty-five years from now when I'm fifty and you're thirty-nine?

61. Jack: No, I just want to reach 40.

62. I would warn against anyone marrying a person with more than a ten-year age difference. It almost never works. It is difficult to find things to talk about, to use similar reference points, and to operate at the same speed of life. Another problem is that both sides usually don't want the same things at the same time.

63. It doesn't matter how you travel it, it's the same road. It doesn't get any easier when you get bigger, it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it.'

64. I shall not again be a candidate for the Presidency...I shall be 65 on the 23rd April next, and I had determined upon my line of life from the remnant of days with which a kind Providence might bless me, discarding every idea of the Presidency...I can now leave public life, I trust, with credit. Should I become President, the case may be very different, after I shall have worn myself out with the toil and anxiety of the office.

65. I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

66. Age does not make us childish, as they say. It only finds us true children still.

67. Once a man's thirty, he's already old, He is indeed as good as dead. It's best to kill him right away.

68. It's not that age brings childhood back again, age merely shows what children we remain.

69. One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.

70. Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

71. No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face.

72. Age is a sicknesse, and Youth is an ambush.

73. Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

74. In your teens and your 20s, you're immortal, you're untouchable. It's only later that you begin to realize you are mortal. (2004)

75. Em geral, nos outros, os Portugueses, so comecamos a ser idiotas - quando chegamos a idade da razao. Em pequenos temos todos uma pontinha de genio.

76. Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age.

77. I'm an old man at fifty-four, without teeth, and with rheumatism.

78. 'But girls often marry when they are too young,' exclaimed Mary-Marie quickly; 'so, if you don't object to my age - '

79. '(I got introduced to) the late and great Mani Madhava Cakyar's King Udayana in Svapnavasavadatta. In what may have been among his last performances on the public stage I was fortunate to see Sri Cakyar, who at an advanced age, literally threw away his walking stick as he entered the stage to become a sprightly royal lover pining away for his beloved Vasavadatta. At his home in Likkadi he demonstrated the nava rasas... Sri Cakyar vividly illustrated to me that kutiyattam acting has the power to transform even the oldest person into the character he portrays' - Prof. Farley P. Richmond (Expert on Indian theatre), Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia.[13]

80. 'for 90 years' - On asking how much years he had studied Kutiyattam. He was 90 years then.

81. How happy he who crowns in shades like these, A youth of labour with an age of ease.

82. Oh sir! I must not tell my age. They say women and music should never be dated.

83. My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

84. I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.

85. Those whom the gods love grow young.

86. The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

87. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

88. I'm not young enough to know everything.

89. He was either a man of about a hundred and fifty who was rather young for his years or a man of about a hundred and ten who had been aged by trouble.

90. Cuando me dicen que soy demasiado viejo para hacer una cosa, procuro hacerla enseguida.

91. Youth flies away and never comes back.

92. I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to 'Hamlet' on the grounds that I knew who won.

93. Well, the old theory was 'marry a older man because they're more mature'. But the new theory is 'men don't mature - marry a young one'.

94. Age is not an accomplishment, and youth is not a sin.

95. It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.

96. What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

97. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'

98. Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

99. How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below. I have to be gone for a season or so.

100. The old dog barks backward without getting up; I can remember when he was a pup.