Quotes & Sayings About Being Old But Young At Heart

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. — Jean Vanier

In my opinion humanity is being prayed upon, I mean as a species. Not only by old satanic families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, Collins, Dupont, Warner, Russell, the world's monarchies, the Vatican. But also prayed upon by these family's employees, by governments, by the military, by banking institutions, by academia. So who does that leave? That's all the people who aren't wealthy, aren't connected, aren't educated, who are easy to manipulate, are easy to persecute and who don't believe any of the issues which you cover on Red Ice. And that's a problem. And that breaks my heart. — Sean Young

Whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being's heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be. — William Wordsworth

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him. — Thomm Quackenbush

The old women in black at early Mass in winter
are a problem for him. He could tell by their eyes
they have seen Christ. They make the kernel
of his being and the clarity around it
seem meager, as though he needs girders
to hold up his unusable soul. But he chooses
against the Lord. He will not abandon his life.
Not his childhood, not the ninety-two bridges
across the two rivers of his youth. Nor the mills
along the banks where he became a young man
as he worked. The mills are eaten away, and eaten
again by the sun and its rusting. He needs them
even though they are gone, to measure against.
The silver is worn down to the brass underneath
and is the better for it. He will gauge
by the smell of concrete sidewalks after night rain.
He is like an old ferry dragged on to the shore,
a home in its smashed grandeur, with the giant beams
and joists. Like a wooden ocean out of control.
A beached heart. A cauldron of cooling melt. — Jack Gilbert

I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four fingers off her hand, and I still hear her cries - "Jesus and Mary, I won't be able to work again!"
The factory. Long live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. — Alvin Toffler

I do not think I have ever experienced so strange a feeling in my life (I am wiser now, perhaps) as that of being with them, remembering how they had been employed, and seeing them enjoy the ride. I was not angry with them; I was more afraid of them, as if I were cast away among creatures with whom I had no community of nature. They were very cheerful. The old man sat in front to drive, and the two young people sat behind him, and whenever he spoke to them leaned forward, the one on one side of his chubby face and the other on the other, and made a great deal of him. They would have talked to me too, but I held back, and moped in my corner; scared by their love-making and hilarity, though it was far from boisterous, and almost wondering that no judgement came upon them for their hardness of heart. So, when they stopped to bait the horse, and ate and drank and — Charles Dickens

[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses' lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:
[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair's turned [white] instead of dark;
my heart's grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.
This state I oft bemoan; but what's to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there's no way.
Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world's end,
handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o'ertook him, husband of immortal wife. — Sappho

I'm a naturist at heart. I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly young people, beautiful old people, whatever. It's so unsexual and so liberating ... — Helen Mirren