The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Age Quotes
Age is another Shakespeare topic, followed by Byron, Longfellow, Seneca and La Rochefoucauld. The best-sourced lines range from sour to funny. Disraeli, in Vivian Grey (1826), hopes the heritage of old age is not despair. Emerson, in Society and Solitude (1870), says we do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count. George Carlin, in It’s Bad for Ya (2008), points out that one great thing about getting old is that you can get out of social obligations just by saying you’re tired.
Three entries are flagged: a passage on the feeling of no longer being a boy, credited to Anatole France, and one on providing for old age so that it may meditate, credited to Pearl S. Buck, are marked misattributed, and Dryden’s lines on old age creeping on with silent pace are disputed.
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
Old age is a tyrant who forbids, upon pain of death, all the pleasures of youth.
We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.
You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.