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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:

Initiation leads to the mount whence vision can be had, a vision of the eternal Now, wherein past, present, and future exist as one. p. 13

Alice Bailey Initiation, Human and Solar (1922)

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Jerome K. Jerome Three Men in a Boat (1889)

Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate.

Carlo Rovelli Forget time (2008)

The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Æquinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetick, which scarce stands one moment.

Thomas Browne

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.
I ask you to come through and show me where you're pouring out the blood of your life.

Carl Sandburg

Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last!
Loitering slow, the Future creepeth —
Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth —
And motionless forever stands the Past.

Friedrich Schiller

Age overtakes us all;
Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin,
Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time.
Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere.

Theocritus

The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.

Thomas Browne

The day of life spent in honest and benevolent labor comes in hope to an evening calm and lovely; and though the sun declines, the shadows that he leaves behind are only to curtain the spirit unto rest.

Henry Giles

Honest labour bears a lovely face.

Thomas Dekker Patient Grissell (1599)

The labour we delight in physics pain.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs Address at Stanford University (2005)

The economic system denies the right of the sincerest and most sympathetic to keep their hands out of the blood of their brothers. We may not go to our rest at night, or waken to our work in the morning, without bearing the burden of the communal guilt; without being ourselves creators and causes of the wrongs we seek to bear away. At every step, when we would do good, evil is present with us, and exacts its tribute from the very citadel of the soul.

George D. Herron Between Caesar and Jesus (1899)

When we have weighed everything, and when our relations in life permit us to choose any given position, we may take that one which guarantees us the greatest dignity, which is based on ideas of whose truth we are completely convinced, which offers the largest field to work for mankind and approach the universal goal for which every position is only a means: perfection.

Karl Marx Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation (1835)

Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Aristotle

Now we have lit a candle to the power
Of atoms; now we know we're heirs of light
Itself...

Philip José Farmer Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)

"The life of this world is made up of three days: yesterday has gone with all that was done; tomorrow, you may never reach; but today is for you so do what you should do today."

Hasan al-Basri

While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time.

William Stringfellow An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973)

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