Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

—H. L. Mencken

I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

—Bernard Baruch

Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

When I was young, I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

—W. Somerset Maugham