Quotes & Sayings About Ageing Well

Shoes are a neutral blessing for us because feet generally aren't regarded as a place where the battle for self-esteem is won or lost. Feet don't change size when the body does through the natural ageing process. — Simon Van Booy

I think there are two aspects to ageing: there's the physical side and what's happening inside. — Rachel Weisz

Of course, the young male demographic has always been the target demographic for 'Star Trek,' the men ageing fifteen to about twenty-five or thirty, a very tough market to appeal to. — Kate Mulgrew

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went. — Philip K. Dick

What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be. — Jorge Luis Borges

So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves. — Barbara Pym

There are things I'd wish weren't part of ageing. But what you gain is much more than you're giving up. I don't think you come into your own until you're 35 or so. — Cindy Crawford

So many interests compete for our young people, from drug barons
to sex traffickers who are constantly looking for ways to revive their ageing workforce — Oche Otorkpa

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. — Alfred Tennyson

Time, That Is Pleased to Lengthen out the Day

Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day
For grieving lovers parted or denied,
And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away
From such as lie enchanted side by side,
Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe
Is he that in my childhood was the thief
Of all my mother's beauty, and in woe
My father bowed, and brought our house to grief.
Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost
Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line,
And so persuade me from you, he has lost;
Never shall he inherit what was mine.
When Time and all his tricks have done their worst,
Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous. — Alan Kinross

There's also something about ageing and the concomitant awareness of the fleeting nature of existence that tends to make you less worried about being ridiculous, and less judgemental about the quality of ridiculousness in others. — Tom Cox

The past is gone. It went by like dusk to dawn. — Steven Tyler

I have absolutely no objection to growing older. I am a stroke survivor so I am extremely grateful to be ageing - I have nothing but gratitude for the passing years. I am ageing - lucky, lucky me! — Sharon Stone

You're never too old to be young. — Paul Palnik

Look, moon
I turned silver for you. — Sanober Khan

This is in the natural order of things
the time of life we've now entered. The afternoon, as Jung called it. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Are we unprepared simply because preparation is not possible? ... We learn
if we are lucky we learn
as we go.
... we are in the center of the stream. Much has already happened, and has formed the shape of our lives as surely as water shapes rock. Much lies ahead of us. We can't see what's coming. We can't know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won't always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge.
...
Life keeps coming at us. Fleeing it is pointless, as is fighting. What I have begun to learn is that there is value in simply standing there
this too
whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around. [pp.239-240] — Dani Shapiro

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In an ageing society, it makes sense to support older adults to develop new skills, prolonging their working lives. — David Blunkett

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Oh, I had, 'No one will ever fancy me!' I had that well into my teens. Even now I do not consider myself to be some kind of great, sexy beauty. I don't mind the way I'm ageing. No reason to panic just yet. I think I look my age, and that's fine. — Kate Winslet

The tender spring upon thy tempting lip
Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted:
Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time. — William Shakespeare

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life. — Pat Conroy

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?"
Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care."
If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is "lost" when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house. — Karen Hitchcock

The lack of manpower and infrastructural capacity in our Intermediate and Long-term Care sectors are problems that have been with us for the past 10 years. The demand for rehabilitation services will only increase with a rapidly ageing population. I hope the Ministry will share its roadmap to meet the rising demand for rehabilitation services. — Low Thia Khiang

For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it. — Nick Bostrom

What is the noble truth of suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering and sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering. — Gautama Buddha

Madeira is a wine like no other. It is fine wine in extremis. Heat and air, both the sworn enemies of most wines and wine makers, conspire to turn madeira into one of the most enthralling of the world's wines as well as the most resilient. Wines from the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries still retain an ethereal, youthful gloss, even after spending what is, in wine terms, an aeon in cask and bottle. Having gone through this extreme and often extensive ageing process, madeira is virtually indestructible. Once the cork is removed, the wine comes to no harm, even if the bottle is left on ullage for months, even for years on end. If ever there was a wine to take away with you to a desert island, this is it. — Richard Mayson

Ageing is not easy, Sennhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. It starts well. It's a most desirable disease. One wouldn't want to do without it. It's like yeast that corrupts the juice of grapes. One loves, one loves, one persists in loving-the incubation period can be very long- and then, with death, comes the heart break. Love must always meet its unwanted end. — Yann Martel

I used to look at Jinks and marvel at her smooth complexion, but over the years I have come to realise that she has been spared wrinkles by virtue of never having succumbed to heavy thought. — Sandi Toksvig

Ageing is very exciting. But if I didn't work on ageing, I'd want to work on the brain. There are really cool techniques you can use now. And bioinformatics. The methods you can use for comparing large data sets - that's so powerful. — Cynthia Kenyon

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel) — Haruki Murakami

Fighting the ageing process just doesn't work. I think that actresses, ultimately, are responsible for the faces we give to women. — Juliette Binoche

The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes. — Matt Haig

We know that so many of the conditions and diseases that we associate with ageing can often be prevented or in fact their onset delayed if we just took preventative steps earlier in our lives. — Julie Bishop

As far as I'm concerned, ageing is humanity's worst problem, by some serious distance. — Aubrey De Grey

I will admit I am quite obsessive about the world of anti-ageing. — Trinny Woodall

Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It's a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology. — Yann Martel

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines. — Joanna Rossiter

I don't think of getting older as looking better or worse; it's just different. You change, and that's OK. Life is about change. I don't have anxiety about it, so I'm not running to get Botox. Maybe that will change, but I don't think so. I feel comfortable in my skin and comfortable with ageing, so I think it's okay that I get wrinkles. — Heidi Klum

Mid-life crises, in Fran's ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises. — Margaret Drabble

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. — Virginia Woolf

I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof. — David Nicholls

People's opinions don't interfere with me. Ageing gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. That's what they call ageing gracefully. You know? — Jeanne Moreau

Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes. — Yuval Noah Harari

As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along. — Julia Gillard

I really dislike it when the media asks young actresses, normally when they're about 23, how they feel about ageing. There are other things to worry about. — Penelope Cruz