I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.
—Bernard Baruch
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
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
—Lawrence Durrell
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 people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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
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
When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.
—George Burns
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
—Saki
Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives.
—Maurice Chevalier
Even very recently, the elders could say [to the youths]: "You know, I have been young and you never have been old." But today's young people can reply: "You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be."… This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.
—Margaret Mead
I used to say, watching two elderly women crossing the street in flowered hats, holding each other's arms, "Look at those cute old ladies." I didn't mind the stereotypes that pepper movies and television shows. Now old people are no longer cute or mean or silly or wise to me. They are people, in all their broken fullness. Despite the glitches in faculties and functioning, anyone who's lived that long has learned something the rest of us don't know.
—Tarn Wilson
I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.
—From a 1975 interview with Mick Jagger, who still performs the song at age sixty-seven
If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
—George Burns
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
—Friedrich Nietzsche