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Retirement Quotes

Retirement does not have a Wikiquote page, so this one borrows from three that do: work, time and age. The result suits a card or a send-off speech better than a close reading. There are lines about labour well done, about the years running on, and about being old that are rueful more often than sentimental.

As elsewhere on the site, each quote links to its own page with the source and the editors’ notes. If you want to put a name under a line in a card, check for a flag first.

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Most quoted on retirement:

And the 24 elders and the four living creatures fell down and worshipped God who sits on the throne and said: “Amen! Praise Jah!” Also, a voice came from the throne and said: “Be praising our God, all you his slaves, who fear him, the small ones and the great.”

John the Evangelist

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.

C. S. Lewis The World's Last Night (1952)

He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that. ’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow ’s held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.

Henry Taylor Philip van Artevelde (1834)

The past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation. … Both are illusions.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

International specialization and division of labor requires institutions and organizations to safeguard property rights across international boundaries so that capital markets as well as other kinds of exchange can take place with credible commitment on the part of the players.

Douglass North Institutions (1990)

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives.

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant (1901)

At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

André Gide Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

If you work hard, you do your part, you should be able to give your children all the opportunities they deserve. That is the basic bargain of America.

Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign (2015)

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

You hear that boy laughing?—you think he’s all fun;
But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

We have lost the old love of work, of work which kept itself company, which was fair weather and music in the heart, which found its reward in the doing, craving neither the flattery of vulgar eyes nor the gold of vulgar men.

John Lancaster Spalding Aphorisms and Reflections (1901)

Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness.

Michael Swanwick Stations of the Tide (1991)

I suddenly felt insecure and feared becoming an employee of some firm that would turn me into a corporate slave with "work ethics" (whenever I hear the word work ethics I interpret inefficient mediocrity).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001)

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Abraham Lincoln

It recognizes charity and communal enterprises as voluntary versions of this same ethic. Such a system would be straight barter, except for the widely felt need for a division of labor in which men, voluntarily, accept value tokens such as cash.

Karl Hess

What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.

Augustine of Hippo

Time is generally the best medicine.

Ovid

Infinita est velocitas temporis quæ magis apparet respicientibus.
The swiftness of time is infinite, which is still more evident to those who look back upon the past.

Seneca the Younger

Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl—
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
A smoldering hearth and a silent stage—
These are a type of the world of Age.

William Ernest Henley

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