Getting Old

Richard Needham
For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done.

Andrew Carnegie
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

Heard in Arkansas
Age mellows some people; others it makes rotten.

Maurice Chevalier
Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

Chinese proverb
Men grow old, pearls grow yellow, there is no cure for it.

Plato
The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.

Tom Wilson
Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age.
Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.

San Banducci
Old age comes at a bad time.

Mignon McLaughlin
The time to begin most things is ten years ago.

Leon Trotsky
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.

François de la Rochefoucauld
Intellectual blemishes, like facial ones, grow more prominent with age.

Edith Wharton
It spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in a small way.

Diana Cooper
Age is an ugly thing, and it goes on getting worse.

H. J. Byron, An Adage
The gardener's rule applies to youth and age:
When young "sow wild oats," but when old, grow sage.

Bernard Baruch
To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

Mark Twain
Consider well the proportion of things. It is better to be a young June bug, than an old bird of paradise.

1651, Herbert
Life is half spent before we know what it is.

Wall Stress Journal
Middle age . . . when a man is at the peak of his yearning power.

James M. Barrie
Life is a long lesson in humility.

Soren Kierkegaard
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forewards.

Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 3.4.283
Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance.

François de la Rochefoucauld
Few people know how to be old.

Arabic proverb
God gives nuts to those with no teeth.

Adolph Zukor, on approaching his hundredth birthday
If I'd known how old I was going to be I'd have taken better care of myself.

Josh Billings
In youth we run into difficulties; in old age difficulties run into us.

Helen Rowland
The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

Mark Twain
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Henri Estienne
If youth knew; if age could.

Arnold Glasow
Find an aim in life before you run out of ammunition.

Latin proverb
Never too old to learn.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Paregra und Paralipomena
A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

Pennsylvania Dutch proverb
We get too soon old and too late smart.

François de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes
As we grow older we grow both more foolish and wiser at the same time.

Malcolm Forbes, The Capitalist Handbook
By the time we've made it, we've had it.

At twenty we worry about what others think of us; at forty we don't care about what others think of us; at sixty we discover they haven't been thinking about us at all.