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What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

— W. Somerset Maugham Points of View (1959)

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More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The Summing Up (1938)

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

All W. Somerset Maugham quotes →

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All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: W. Somerset Maugham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.