Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
—George Orwell
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
—Robertson Davies
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
—Woody Allen
When you’re a teenager, your friends are your life. When you grow up, friendships seem to get pushed further and further back, until it seems like a luxury.
—Sarah Addison Allen in The Peach Keeper
The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.
—Doug Larson
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.
—Leon Trotsky
It is not the conscious changes made in their lives by men and women—a new job, a new town, a divorce—which really shape them, like the chapter headings in a biography, but a long, slow mutation of emotion, hidden, all-penetrative; something by which they may be so taken up that the practical outward changes of their lives in the world, noted with surprise, scandal, or envy by others, pass almost unnoticed by themselves.
—Nadine Gordimer
How can one accept—let alone enjoy—aging in a culture where God is twenty-five; where advertisements are filled with twenty-somethings in halter tops and tight t-shirts, unless the ad is for a drug to treat incontinence, high blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol? What about the wisdom of age? What about endurance? What about the beauty of a face etched by years that were not always easy?
—Genie Zeiger
When do I stop? When I'm twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.
—Meg Wolitzer in The Interestings
The first years of man must make provision for the last.
—Samuel Johnson in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
—Pablo Picasso
Sure I'm for helping the elderly. I'm going to be old myself some day.
—Lillian Gordy Carter
Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.
—Wilson Mizner