Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
—Richard Bach
We all want to be happy, and we're all going to die. … You might say these are the only two unchallengeably true facts that apply to every human being on this planet.
—William Boyd
He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
—Simone Weil
We often hear of the beauties of old age, but the only old age that is beautiful is the one the man has been long preparing for by living a beautiful life. Every one of us is right now preparing for old age. … There may be a substitute somewhere in the world for Good Nature, but I do not know where it can be found. The secret of salvation is this: keep sweet, be useful, and keep busy.
—Elbert Hubbard
Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
—John Updike
Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The whiter my hair becomes, the more ready people are to believe what I say.
—Bertrand Russell
Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Life goes on, having nowhere else to go.
—Diane Ackerman
Old age was growing inside me. It kept catching my eye from the depths of the mirror. I was paralyzed sometimes as I saw it making its way toward me so steadily when nothing inside me was ready for it.
—Simone de Beauvoir
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
—Lawrence Durrell
Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!
—Paul Claudel
You need to learn to accept your flaws and forgive yourself.
—Susan Mallery in Two of a Kind