Age And Youth Quotes & Sayings

Combine nursing homes with nursery schools. Bring very old and very young together: they interest one another. — John Cage

Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have elsewhere said, "looks before her." Nature divides living beings into those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible, increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love. Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor children. — Victor Hugo

Books are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions by night, in traveling, in the country. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind. — Stefan Zweig

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I — Plato

I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism. — P.G. Wodehouse

No; my heart tells me it is not. I might have thought so once, but now, I say, give me the girl I love, and I will swear eternal constancy to her and her alone, through summer and winter, through youth and age, and life and death! if age and death must come. — Anne Bronte

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care. — William Shakespeare

War made by age and fought by youth while age looked on and applauded and encored. — Evadne Price

All things old become new again. In my youth the athletes had crew cuts and the hippies had long hair. Now the athletes have long hair and the hippies are bald. — Harley King

But for a long time, and probably far too long, I had a secret wish: the adolescently romantic idea that there was someone out there for me; someone I hadn't met yet who would ask me on a date and make sense of my life. I harbored the hope, I'm now embarrassed to admit, that like a girl in a Lifetime movie, I would look into someone's eyes and find a reflection of my inner life. But sometime between my teenage years and the first years in New York, that idea had pretty well evaporated. I'd grown up. — Diane Meier

If man had the wisdom of age in youth and the vitality of youth in age, then he would be an eternally wise young man. (Feb 2003) — James King

That's the funny thing about writing your life story. You start out trying to remember dates and times and names. You think it's about facts, your life; that what you'll look back on and remember are the successes and failures, the time line of your youth and middle age, but that isn't it at all. Love. Family. Laughter. That's what I remember when it's all said and done. — Kristin Hannah

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience. — Martin Filler

For these reasons, as soon as my age permitted me to pass from under the control of my instructors, I entirely abandoned the study of letters, and resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world. I spent the remainder of my youth in traveling, in visiting courts and armies, in holding intercourse with men of different dispositions and ranks, in collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me, — Rene Descartes

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative. — Peter Dube

The pride of youth is in strength and beauty, the pride of old age is in discretion. — Democritus

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why? — Anton Chekhov

Every woman should have a youth she's content to leave behind and a past juicy enough that she's looking forward to telling it in her old age — Pamela Redmond Satran

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world. — Maurice Chevalier

We devote the activity of our youth to revelry and the decrepitude of our old age to repentance: and we finish the farce by bequeathing our dead bodies to the chancel, which when living, we interdicted from the church. — Charles Caleb Colton

What is stronger in us - passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering? — Nikolai Gogol

Happily there exists more than one kind of beauty. There is the beauty of infancy, the beauty of youth, the beauty of maturity, and, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the beauty of age. — George Augustus Henry Sala

Other relaxations are peculiar to certain times, places and stages of life, but the study of letters is the nourishment of our youth, and the joy of our old age. They throw an additional splendor on prosperity, and are the resource and consolation of adversity; they delight at home, and are no embarrassment abroad; in short, they are company to us at night, our fellow travelers on a journey, and attendants in our rural recesses. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days ... — Kellie Elmore

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. — Plato

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age. — James Thurber

Let us assume that entertainment is the sole end of reading; even so I think you would hold that no mental employment is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding. Other pursuits belong not to all times, all ages, all conditions; but this gives stimulus to our youth and diversion to our old age; this adds a charm to success, and offers a haven of consolation to failure. Through the night-watches, on all our journeyings, and in our hours of ease, it is our unfailing companion. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cynicism is a boring and dull old man's disease people have no business getting when they're young. — Erika Lopez

I am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth that men lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age- which can only arise from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the experiences of a long life- and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms out in thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, without being able to put these into practice immediately, because of their very superabundance. These furnish the building materials and plans for the future; and it is from them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless the so-called wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth. — Adolf Hitler

Great is Youth
equally great is Old Age
great are Day and Night.
Great is Wealth
great is Poverty
great is Expression-great is Silence. — Walt Whitman

Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor. — Euripides

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

Did all the lets and bars appear
To every just or larger end,
Whence should come the trust and cheer?
Youth must its ignorant impulse lend
Age finds place in the rear.
All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,
The champions and enthusiasts of the state — Herman Melville

Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied. — William James Mayo

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that
perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims ... — Oscar Wilde

The wind was blowing from the east and the cedars bent before it, - blowing from the east like the breath of the war god. And Fred and Stanley were waving their hats gayly back to her, while the cedars bent and the wind blew from the east. They were like her own boys marching off to war. Children of her children, she loved them as she had loved their parents. Did a woman never get over loving? Deep love brought relatively deep heartaches. Why could not a woman of her age, whose family was raised, relinquish the hold upon her emotions? Why could she not have a peaceful old age, wherein there entered neither great affection nor its comrade, great sorrow? She had seen old women who seemed not to care as she was caring, whose emotions seemed to have died with their youth. Could she not be one of them? For a long time she stood in the window and looked at the cedars twisting before the east wind, like so many helpless women under the call from the east. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age ... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age. — Julian Barnes

For a moment man is a boy, for a moment a lovesick youth, for a moment bereft of wealth, for a moment in the height of prosperity; then at life's end with limbs worn out by old age and wrinkles adorning his face, like an actor he retires behind the curtain of death. — Bhartrhari

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And, according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing. — Isaac Newton

The three ages of man: youth, middle age and 'my word you do look well'. — June Whitfield

Learning to code at a young age opened my eyes to the incredibly exciting world of technology and entrepreneurship. Our youth deserve the opportunity to learn the skills that will enable them to succeed in our connected world. — Marc Benioff

Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill — Fausto Coppi

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet. — Bertrand Russell

Age looked at youth, and youth's applause first weakened, then died. — Stephen King

It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: "youth" is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth. — Philippe Aries

Age is a seasoned trickster. To our parents, we will always be children. Within ourselves, the same yearnings of youth; the same aspirations of adolescence, will last a lifetime. Only to the young - blinded by our grey hair and slowing gait - do we appear old and increasingly beyond the pale. — Alex Morritt

In life you'll face difficulties that postpone some of your dreams. Regardless, life goes fast by reminding us youth is finite and old age is stable. So you mustn't stop dreaming and running while your strength is yet tough. — Darmie Orem

It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth - no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me - for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit. — Elizabeth Gaskell

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. — T.E. Lawrence

Think, speak, and act. With age comes self-reproach: I might have done more. Therefore now do! — Theophile Thore

These (literary) studies are the food of youth, and consolation of age; they adorn prosperity, and are the comfort and refuge of adversity; they are pleasant at home, and are no incumbrance abroad; they accompany us at night, in our travels, and in our rural retreats. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong. — Edna Ferber

The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them; not only because these never leave a Man, not even in the extremest Old Age; but because a Conscience bearing Witness that our Life was well-spent, together with the Remembrance of past good Actions, yields an unspeakable Comfort to the Soul — Marcus Tullius Cicero

We all have a limited amount and that it's a privilege to grow old. That's something that I think a lot of people have forgotten in this very fast-paced world where youth is overly celebrate. — Laura Linney

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We, as artists, we have the right to express ourselves. That is our first amendment, freedom of speech. But I also believe that we have an obligation to the youth to be somewhat responsible in what we say on records. But I think that comes with age. I think that comes with artists growing up and becoming assured of who they are as people. — Ja Rule

All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age. — Herman Melville

I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea. — William Cobbett

Sheila's about the only young girl in this place and she naturally assumes that she ought to have it all her own way with the young things in trousers. Naturally it annoys her when a woman, who in her view is middle-aged and who has already two husbands to her credit, comes along and licks her on her own ground. [...] No, I think it's age daring to defeat youth that annoys her so much! — Agatha Christie

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. — Wendell Berry

It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on. — Mark Twain

Education is the food of youth, the delight of old age, the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity, and the provocation to grace in the soul. — Saint Augustine

As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young. — Henry Ward Beecher

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.' — Gloria Steinem

Age isn't triggered by wrinkles,nor by the reduction of strong footing,for the true youth exists effectively in your heart,brightens through your smile and beats slow when your heart is right, innocent like that of a child — Nwilliams S C

All the images of carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis: birth and death (the image of pregnant death), blessing and curse (benedictory carnival curses which call simultaneously for death and rebirth), praise and abuse, youth and old age, top and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom. — Mikhail Bakhtin

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun

Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. — Lorrie Moore

To all that come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America ... with hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world. — Walt Disney Company

He was good looking, "sort of distinguished when he wants to be", had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire — F Scott Fitzgerald

That the crowning miracle of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth - for of flower or blossom such youth has none - the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post- Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it. — Charles Dickens

We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful. — Alexander McCall Smith

Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power
that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision. — Christian Nestell Bovee

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. — Henry James

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Was he the only one who was just old enough to speak out, not yet so old and jaded that he acceded to authority over anything else?

Or was it the opposite? Was he of the age where he had the ignorance of youth coupled with the arrogance of adulthood? — Wildbow

And, Father, most of all, you taught
Me there's a Pow'r in love that naught
Can thwart, and that it moves where truth
And courage speak, and neither youth
Nor age can hinder its success,
But only fear and quietness. — John Piper

Exactly. I think the original tantric Buddhists took notice of was some very wise old people who never studied in their youth, but took part in a range of risk-taking adventures when they were younger, and finally became wise when they reflected upon their lives in old age. There is only one problem."
"Which is?"
"Risk-taking is a way to die young. It is dangerous and you may forfeit the opportunity to grow old. An early death is not a sure path to wisdom in old age," Ranjit said, running his finger around the inside of the pipe bowl, "and if you survive without reflecting, then you simply become an old degenerate. — Joe Niemczura

For sure we live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we're not young and glowing and "hot," we don't matter. But I refuse to buy into such a distorted view of reality. And I would never lie about or deny my age. To do so is to contribute to a sickness pervading our society - the sickness of wanting to be what you're not. I know for sure that only by owning who and what you are can you step into the fullness of life. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into the myth that you can be what you once were. The way to your best life isn't denial. It's owning every moment and staking a claim to the here and now. You're not the same woman you were a decade ago; if you're lucky, you're not the same woman you were last year. The whole point of aging, as I see it, is change. If we let them, our experiences can keep teaching us about ourselves. I celebrate that. Honor it. Hold it in reverence. And I'm grateful for every age I'm blessed to become. — Oprah Winfrey

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life. — Willa Cather

Death, torture and prison are part of daily life for the youth of Iran. They are not like us, my friends and I at their age; they are not scared. They are not what we were. They hold hands and scream: 'Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! We are together!' They understand that no one will give them their rights; they must go get them. — Marjane Satrapi

Love is a feeling that must be felt from the heart and seen through inner beauty. Only if this was known to the youth, many a marriages would have blossomed with age and cherished through decades. Just like a plant that needs the sun, water and more time to grow into a beautiful tree with lovely leaves and flowers, love needs time to be nurtured over time, built on a strong foundation of friendship, trust and honesty. When this foundation is built and combined with the feeling that tickles you from within, that is when love actually happens, the rest is all infatuation, attraction or even lust. — Jagdish Joghee

For although we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to old age, that fortunes and thrones crumble (even the most solid among them) and that fame is transitory, the manner in which - by means of a sort of snapshot - we take cognisance of this moving universe whirled along by Time, has the contrary effect of immobilising it. — Marcel Proust

They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment. — Charles Frazier

Our hands meet for an instant and she withdraws quickly, frightened she might catch something. Old age perhaps. — Kate Morton

Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries - America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires. — Jess Walter

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending. — Anne Bradstreet

was not death for which she grieved, but life, life which had carved his mouth into such sorrow and had set hollows underneath his eyes, which had given him dreams of love in his youth and then had robbed him, had given him dreams in his age of free islands in a blue and tropic sea and had held him locked in a drab house in a little town. And as cruel as anything was death, which revealed him like this, when he was helpless any longer to hide that which alive he had hidden. She went away crying most passionately to her heart, "We ought all to be free. Everybody ought to be free for himself, somehow. No one ought to come to death and never have known what freedom is." When — Pearl S. Buck

I'm not opposed to aging - even though society is kinder on men than women when it comes to getting old. How can I look at aging as the enemy? It happens whether I like it or not and no one is set apart from growing old; it comes to us all. Youth passes from everyone, so why deny it? I'm proud of my age. I'm proud that I've survived this planet for as long as I have, and should I end up withered, wrinkled and with a lifetime of great wisdom, I'll trade the few years of youth for the sophistication of a great mind ... for however long it lasts. — Donna Lynn Hope

Man has boyhood, adolescence, youth, middle age and senescence, as stages of growth; there are also corresponding stages in the growth of wisdom in him. — Sathya Sai Baba

We must not be taken in by the myth of youth, the unending propaganda to the effect that young men are younger than old men; that they are better looking; that they are slimmer, stronger and more athletic; that they can hold a girl in more romantic fashion and speak more sweetly. — Isaac Asimov

Life is short and tedious, and is wholly spent in wishing; we trust to find rest and enjoyment at some future time, often at an age when our best blessings, youth and health, have already left us. When at last I that time has arrived, it surprises us in the midst of fresh desires; we have got no farther when we are attacked by a fever which kills us; if we had been cured, it would only have been to give us more time for other desires. — Jean De La Bruyere

Looking around today, I see a lot of young people who act as if they have all the time in the world, and older persons who think this attitude is alright. It is unfortunate that there are young citizens who still believe life begins at forty and that life before forty is non-scoring, and older citizens who still insist that unless you are old, you have nothing to offer, equating age with wisdom. — Nana Awere Damoah

Nay even in the life, of the same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and reparation - hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and going; and equally true of knowledge, and what is still more surprising to us mortals, not only do the sciences in general spring up and decay, so that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them individually experiences a like change. — Diotima

When young, we trust ourselves too much, and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute. — Charles Caleb Colton

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going. — J.B. Priestley