Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.
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.
Most quoted on retirement:
Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.
Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.
Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of.
Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return.
He who prays and labours lifts his heart to God with his hands.
I’ve climbed up here
holding the hilt of time’s sword
after driving it
into my tender heart.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.