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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:

Awakening as a future event has no meaning because awakening is the realization of Presence. So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment, and if they are not arising at this moment, they are no more than a thought in your head and therefore not arising at all.

Eckhart Tolle A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (2005)

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat.

Noam Chomsky

If you made a mistake in the past and learn from it now, you are using clock time. On the other hand, if you dwell on it mentally, and self-criticism, remorse, or guilt come up, then you are making the mistake into “me” and “mine”: you make it part of your sense of self, and it has become psychological time, which is always linked to a false sense of identity.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

One of the duties of old-age, is the management of time. The less that remains to us, the more valuable we ought to consider it. (p. 121).

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert

Beyond the grave! As the vision rises how this side dwindles into nothing — a speck — a moment — and its glory and pomp shrink into the trinkets and baubles that amuse an infant for a day. Only those things, in the glory of this light, which lay hold of immortality, seem to have any value.

Randolph Sinks Foster Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

There probably has to be a worldview for practical men who must be strong enough to get their hands dirty in political practice without getting dirty themselves, and even if they do, who cares? And a second worldview for youths, simpletons, women, and sensitive souls, for whom “purity” is just the right thing. One could call it a division of labor among temperaments.

Peter Sloterdijk Critique of Cynical Reason (1987)

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Nikola Tesla My Inventions (1919)

Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing

Omar Khayyám

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

J. R. R. Tolkien

He more we live, more brief appear
Our life's succeeding stages;
A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages.

Thomas Campbell

The present is our own; but while we speak,
We cease from its possession, and resign
The stage we tread on, to another race,
As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves.

Thomas Love Peacock

Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill,
Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will.
Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem:
Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem.

Francis Quarles

But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen,
We will work for ourself and a woman, for ever and ever, Amen.

Rudyard Kipling

What work's, my countrymen, in hand? where go you
With bats and clubs? The matter? speak, I pray you.

William Shakespeare

[A]t the crossroads of our history, we need to turn our backs on the past.

F. W. de Klerk

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

G. K. Chesterton The Defendant (1901)

seeming's enough for slaves of space and time
—ours is the now and here of freedom. Come

E. E. Cummings

I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago. Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and realise it's me.

Dave Allen

I need to wake out of my stupor and begin work. ...my body stands frozen in a snow packed tundra waiting for rescue. It may take a few days before that happens, since my mind is on vacation in Alberta right now.

Michael Scott Gallegos

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