Quotes about Aging

My old age is a precious gift. My brain still works. I like my brain. I feel lighter. I am free of self-doubt, irrational desires, useless complexes, and other deadly sins that are not worth the trouble. I am letting go…letting go. I should have started earlier.

What's the worst thing about growing old?" she would ask them. They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now?

Irina could not imagine the courage it took to grow old without becoming too frightened; her knowledge of age

There's a difference between being old and being ancient. It doesn't have to do with age, but physical and mental health," Cathy explained. "Those who are old can remain independent, but those who are ancient need help and supervision; there comes a moment when they're like children again.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

Wrinkles - the service stripes of life.

The hoary beard is a crown of glory if it be found in the way of righteousness.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

The commonest symptoms of this fear are: The tendency to slow down and develop an inferiority complex at the age of mental maturity, around the age of forty, falsely believing one's self to be "slipping" because of age. (The truth is that man's most useful years, mentally and spiritually, are those between forty and sixty).

Marry the man who's going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you're going to look like in fifty years?

Old age teaches you in a very unkind way that things won't necessarily get better. Not in this life. In fact, you can pretty much count on things degenerating. Being content is not a lack of ambition. It's being able to rest and relax and know that your worth doesn't come from what others think of you or even what you think of you.

Flight from life does not exempt us from the law of age and death. The neurotic who tries to wriggle out of the necessity of living wins nothing and only burdens himself with a constant foretaste of aging and dying, which must appear especially cruel on account of the total emptiness and meaninglessness of his life.