Seasons of the Soul

There must be a day or two in a man’s life
when he is the precise age for something important.

—Franklin P. Adams

Middle age occurs when you are
too young to take up golf
and too old to rush up to the net.

—Franklin Pierce Adams

Inside every older person is a younger person
wondering what the hell happened.

—Cora Harvey Armstrong

Old age is like everything else;
to make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

—Fred Astaire

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

—Lucille Ball

What could be more beautiful than a dear old lady growing wise with age?
Every age can be enchanting, provided you live within it.

—Brigitte Bardot

It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.

—Brigitte Bardot

When the first baby laughed for the first time,
the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about,
and that was the beginning of fairies.

—James M. Barrie

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh yourself.

—Ethel Barrymore

To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

—Bernard M. Baruch

A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair,
inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath,
a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys
to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness
when the matter of rent is brought up.

—Robert Benchley

A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.

—Arnold Bennett

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

—Jack Benny

At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.

—Jim Bishop

If I’d known I was going to live this long (100 years), I’d have taken better care of myself.

—Ubie Blake

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be . . .

—Robert Browning

It is the old apple trees that are decked with the loveliest blossoms.
It is the ancient redwoods that rise to majestic heights.
It is the old violins that produce the richest tones.
It is ancient coins, stamps and furniture that people seek.
It is the old friends that are loved the best.
Thank God for the blessings of age and the wisdom,
patience and maturity that go with it.

—Sister Mary Gemma Brunke

To me, old age is always ten years older than I am.

—John Burroughs

The greatest comfort of my old age, and that which gives me the highest satisfaction,
is the pleasing remembrance of the many benefits and friendly offices I have done to others.

—Marcus Cato

Middle age is when your classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald they don’t recognize you.

—Bennett Cerf

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty, but it’s up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

—Coco Chanel

Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.

—Maurice Chevalier

Men grow old, pearls grow yellow, there is no cure for it.

—Chinese proverb

Middle Age: When you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

—Georges Clemenceau

They tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you grow older.
What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much.

— Malcolm Cowley

It is better to wear out than to rust out.

—Bishop Richard Cumberland

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it.

—Doris Day

If you want to look young and thin, hang around old fat people.

—Jim Eason

I am long on ideas, but short on time. I expect to live to be only about a hundred.

—Thomas Edison

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest.
You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

—T. S. Eliot

The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

—English proverb

If we could be twice young and twice old, we could correct all our mistakes.
Birth and Death are the two noblest expressions of bravery.

—Euripides

A man is getting old when he walks around a puddle instead of through it.

—R. C. Ferguson

Old age is not for sissies.

—Malcolm Forbes

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.

—Benjamin Franklin

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.

—French proverb

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday, but never remembers her age.

—Robert Frost

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

—Margaret Fuller

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

—Andre Gide

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

—Ellen Glasgow

For all the advances in medicine, there is still no cure for the common birthday.

—John Glenn

Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

You are only young once, but you can be immature for a lifetime.

—John P. Grier

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler-quieter, warmer.

—Dag Hammarskjold

There are days of oldness, and then one gets young again.

—Katherine Butler Hathaway

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin.
He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up . . . a lot of people don’t have the courage to do it.

—Helen Hayes

If you survive long enough, you’re revered—rather like an old building.

—Katherine Hepburn

You will recognize, my boy, the first sign of old age: it is when you go out into the streets of London
and realize for the first time how young the policemen look.

—Sir Seymour Hicks

At middle age the soul should be opening up like a rose, not closing up like a cabbage.

—John Andrew Holmes

You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four.
A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

A man over nintey is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors:
he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost;
and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him
before he can come near their camp.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

What I wouldn’t give to be seventy again!

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

You know you are getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.

—Bob Hope

Middle age is when you still believe you’ll feel better in the morning.

—Bob Hope

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.

—Bob Hope

Men are like wine. Some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.

—C. E. M. Joad

At seventy-seven it is time to be earnest.

—Samuel Johnson

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty.
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

—Franz Kafka

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is the work of art.

—Garson Kanin

Once I was looking through the kitchen window at dusk, and I saw an old woman looking in.
Suddenly the light changed and I realized that the old woman was myself.
You see, it all happens on the outside; inside one doesn’t change.

—Molly Keane

Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she could not part with it.

—Rudyard Kipling

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life—it gave me me.

—Anne Lamott

Birth may be a matter of a moment, but it is a unique one.

—Frederick Leboyer

Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.

—Caryn Leschen

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The secret to eternal youth is arrested development.

—Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Birthdays are good for you.
Statistics show that the people who have the most, live the longest.

—Reverend Larry Lorenzoni

Time draweth wrinkles in a fair face, but addeth fresh colors to a fast friend.

—John Lyle

Most of us can remember a time when a birthday—
especially if it was one’s own brightened the world as if a second sun has risen.

—Robert Lynd

Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.

—Anna Magnani

Of middle age, the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned
how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

—Don Marquis

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

—Groucho Marx

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person
has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

—Don Marquis

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men.

—Colleen McCullough

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood,
all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

—Margaret Mead

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm.
Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do about it.

— Golda Meir

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

—Henry L. Mencken

How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

—John Milton

The first hundred years are the hardest.

—Wilson Mizner

Call this an unfair generalization if you must, but old people are no good at everything.

—Moe, from the Simpsons

Middle age is when you’ve met so many people
that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

—Ogden Nash

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

—Ogden Nash

Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.

—Ralph Parlette

We grow too soon old and too late smart.

—Pennsylvania Dutch proverb

Youth has no age.

—Pablo Picasso

It takes a long time to grow young.

—Pablo Picasso

Life begins at forty.

—W. B. Pitkin

Old age: A great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold,
you may have escaped, not from one master but from many.

—Plato

The spiritual eyesight improves as the physical eyesight declines.

—Plato

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you have not committed.

—Anthony Powell

The best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once.

—H. V. Prochnow

The advantage of being eighty years old is that one has had many people to love.

—Jean Renoir

Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time.

—Jean Paul Richter

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little;
for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

When you turn thirty, a whole new thing happens: you see yourself acting like you parents.

—Blair Sabol

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

—George Sand

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

—George Santayana

Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

—Charles Schultz

In a dream you are never eighty.

—Anne Sexton

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.

—William Shakespeare

You’ve heard of the three ages of man: Youth, age, and “you are looking wonderful.”

—Francis Cardinal Spellman

The heyday of woman’s life is the shady side of fifty.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

We are always the same age inside.

—Gertrude Stein

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

—Tom Stoppard

Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy.
Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.

—Dorothy Thompson

Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty eight and forty.

—James Thurber

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents.
From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks.
From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality.
From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.

—Sophie Tucker

Wrinkles merely indicate where smiles have been.

—Mark Twain

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

—Mark Twain

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

—Orson Welles

Those whom the gods love grow young.

—Oscar Wilde

One should never trust a woman who tells her real age.
A woman who would tell one that would tell anything.

—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

I am not young enough to know everything.

—Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

—Oscar Wilde

Thirty five is a very attractive age;
London society is full of women who have of their own free choice remained thirty-five for years.

—Oscar Wilde

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

—Oscar Wilde

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth
of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

—Virginia Woolf

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship
with other human beings as we take our place among them.

—Virginia Woolf