Boys must not have th' ambitious care of men,
Nor men the weak anxieties of age.
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.
And the bright faces of my young companions
Are wrinkled like my own, or are no more.
Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing seems real except what is unreal.
Old friends are best. King James us'd to call for his Old Shoes, they were easiest for his Feet.
The sunshine fails, the shadows grow more dreary,
And I am near to fall, infirm and weary.
Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
On his bold visage middle age
Had slightly press'd its signet sage.
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.