Quotes & Sayings About Senility

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything. — D.H. Lawrence

Inflation is the senility of democracies. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. — H.L. Mencken

To a man of certain age ... all young ladies start to look delightful. It's the first symptom of senility. — Lois McMaster Bujold

You should be so lucky to be like me. I allow myself to be disturbed too often. I'll probably end up talking to birds in a park. But you'll probably end up with regrets. — Darnell Lamont Walker

There are three things admiration affirms; the lack of autonomy, the senility of the mind, and the strength of desperation. Irrationality and inferiority are the progenitors of admiration. — Lionel Suggs

It is pardonable for children to yell that they believe in fairies, but it is somehow sinister when the piping note shifts from the puerile to the senile. — Christopher Hitchens

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach. — Mary Roach

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. — Martin Amis

We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt.
"Don't be childish, darling."
"I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself."
It is possible to be grateful that no one that you would willingly associate with you say, "Be mature. Be well-balanced, be well-adjusted."
Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people except the professional invaders and spoilers into children. No one says to anyone in Africa, "Why don't you grow up?" ...
Men know that they are children in relation to the country and, as in armies, seniority and senility ride close together. But to have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man ... But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility. — Ernest Hemingway,

I am in the prime of senility. — Benjamin Franklin

Why, you want me to hook you two up?"
Cordy eyed her, then let out a grunt. "Could you? Michael Thorley turned out to be an assclown, and the rest of this place is nothing but a barren wasteland of undateability. The only guy who's shown the slightest amount of interest in me this summer is Mr. Papadopoulos on the third floor of the nursing home. He says I have the ass of a Russian call girl."
"Ah, senility. — Gina Damico

This struggle between good and evil, fresh and stale, new and decrepit,
between the vigor of moral youth and the dotage of senility, is of positive benefit, for it keeps the perennial moral values alive — Fazlur Rahman

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. — Malcolm Muggeridge

There is no such thing as senility when it comes to envy, greed laziness, wrath and pride. It's her destructive character from childhood." ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You — Angelica Hopes

that's what I love about you," he said. "You help the mantle of senility rest so gently. — Steven F. Havill

Parents who are unwilling to risk the suffering of changing and growing and learning from their children are choosing a path of senility - whether they know it or not - and their children and the world will leave them far behind. Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age. Sadly, most do not take this opportunity. The Risk of Confrontation The final and possibly the greatest risk of love is the risk of exercising power with humility. — M. Scott Peck

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity. — Tom Lehrer

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth. — John Barth

I have this condition I call impromptu senility. I can't remember a damn thing when I don't want to. — Laurann Dohner

We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing what they see and being asked to cure it. Blood and vomit and pus do not revolt them; senility and dementia have no terrors; it does not alarm them to plunge into the slippery tangle of internal organs, or to handle the infected and contagious. For them, the flesh and its diseases have been abstracted, rendered coolly diagrammatic and quickly subject to infallible diagnosis and effective treatment. The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it ... displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors. — John Updike

I am in the prime of my senility. — Joel Chandler Harris

There are three signs of senility. The first sign is that a man forgets his theorems. The second sign is that he forgets to zip up. The third sign is that he forgets to zip down. — Paul Erdos

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals. — Patrick White

There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightning with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more. — Yukio Mishima

The actual individual, in whom this myth of the Favourite Son was founded, was indeed remarkable. Born of shepherd parents among the Southern Andes, he had first become famous as the leader of a romantic "youth movement"; and it was this early stage of his career that won him followers. He urged the young to set an example to the old, to live their own life undaunted by conventions, to enjoy, to work hard but briefly, to be loyal comrades. Above all, he preached the religious duty of remaining young in spirit. No one, he said, need grow old, if he willed earnestly not to do so, if he would but keep his soul from falling asleep, his heart open to all rejuvenating influences and shut to every breath of senility. The delight of soul in soul, he said, was the great rejuvenator; it re-created both lover and beloved. — Olaf Stapledon

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees ... — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nothing is sadder than someone who has lost his memory, and the church which has lost its memory is in the same state of senility. — Henry Chadwick

They listen to the music of idiots and amuse themselves with the sordid miseries of their businesses. They are not the things of angels or of any higher outpost that humanity might aspire to. Your loathsome vomitous businessman king is of the lowest order, his advisors crumbling mockeries of education driven by avarice. My love, dress them in the suits of mockery, and in their advanced state of stupidity and senility, burn and destroy them, so their ashes might join the compost which they so much deserve. — Lou Reed

Success is different at different stages of development - from not wetting your pants in infancy, to being well liked in childhood and adolescence, to getting laid in young adulthood, to making money and having prestige in later adulthood, to getting laid in middle age, to being well liked in old age, to not wetting your pants in senility. What's — John Bradshaw

You know, you look at the chaos in the conservative camp right now, it's only too tempting to blame it all on pot. But in fact, the Reagan revolution owes a lot to Reefer. For one thing, it's made the symptoms of senility socially acceptable. — A. Whitney Brown

Time and happenings and the grace of God are the best solvers of puzzles. One must leave much to these, if he is not to worry himself into premature senility. — Alex Dow

I was astonished at how wonderful these books were; and even though I was occasionally discomforted when someone, having asked me what book I had in my pocket, looked aghast when I pulled out a copy of Heidi or Finn Family Moomintroll, I soon realized that my then-present condition of "second childhood" was not one of senility and depression but of renewal and awakening. — Jonathan Cott

[...]when everybody starts laughing at Ra's old hair and senility he gets real pissed and when you are a god and you are real pissed there is only one solution, my friends: GENOCIDE. — Cory O'Brien

I think senility is going to be a fairly smooth transition for me. - TRUE FACT Beep — Darynda Jones

It is a pledge that senility has not the last say in everything. — Shane Leslie

You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture ... Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one. — Albert Einstein

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars ... — Oswald Spengler

You know, I have found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours on end, and the government can't stop me ... It's called senility. — Robert Anton Wilson

The fifth stage is one of waste and squandering. In this stage, the ruler wastes on pleasures and amusements the treasures accumulated by his ancestors, through excessive generosity to his inner circle. Also, he acquires bad low-class followers to whom he entrusts the most important matters of state, which they are not qualified to handle by themselves, not knowing which of them they should tackle and which they should leave alone. The ruler seeks to destroy the great clients of his people and followers of his predecessors. ( ... )Thus, he ruins the foundations his ancestors had laid and tears down what they had built up. In this stage, the dynasty is seized by senility and the chronic disease from which it can hardly ever rid itself, for which it can find no cure, and eventually it is destroyed. — Ibn Khaldun

It was at this moment that I wrote my first important paper in theoretical physics. I was 32 years old, 5 years beyond the alleged age of senility for theorists. — Robert B. Laughlin

She's wearing the dreamy expression peculiar to the very old and the very young, where they seem fascinated by something everyone else takes for granted. People find the phenomenon adorable in babies. It means they're inquisitive and intrigued by objects in their new world. In old people they usually chalk it up to senility, but I don't think that's the case. For both, it's the ability to see things in their purest sense. All the knowledge that comes from experience doesn't exist for a child and doesn't matter anymore to an old lady. With a life completely in front of you or a life completely behind you, the world looks basically the same. She — Tawni O'Dell

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself ... A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us. — John Steinbeck

Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility. — John Kenneth Galbraith

My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a "symptom"? There — May Sarton

Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative interaction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old. — Louise J. Kaplan

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady. — Fay Weldon

Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering. — James Gleick

Sometimes I worry that there's not enough room in my brain for both my dreams and reality that I'm a hard drive with limited gigabytes and one day I won't be able to maintain the firewall between them. I wonder if that's what senility is. — Karen Marie Moning

That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations. — Neal Stephenson

What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead — David Lodge

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious ... — May Sarton

'Don't worry about senility', my grandfather used to say. — Bill Cosby

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty. (127 — Timothy Schaffert

Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It's almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on. Through the most ordinary things, books, for instance, or a postcard, or eyes or hands, life is transformed. Hands that for decades reached out to hurt us, to drag us down, to control us, or to wave us away in dismissal now reach for us differently. They become instruments of tenderness, buoyancy, exploration, hope. — Anne Lamott

Most people do not have a problem with being old. They have a problem with looking old. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood. — Edward Abbey

From that time on the parish priest began to show signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People live their lives, constantly surrounded by anxiety. if they live long before dying, they end up in senility, worn out by concerns: a terrible fate! The body is treated in a very harsh fashion. Courageous men are seen by everyone under Heaven as worthy, but this doesn't preserve them from death. I am not sure I know whether this is sensible or not. — Zhuangzi

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. This has produced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of perpetually talking about "young nations" and "dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed and physical span of life. Thus people will say that Spain has entered a final senility; they might as well say that Spain is losing all her teeth. Or people will say that Canada should soon produce a literature; which is like saying that Canada must soon grow a new moustache. — G.K. Chesterton

Term limits would cure both senility and seniority- both terrible legislative diseases. — Harry S. Truman

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility. — H.L. Mencken

God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference. — Ron Sims

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it. — Jean Baudrillard

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, old people in America had prayed, "Please God, don't let me look poor." In the year 2000, they prayed, "Please God, don't let me look old." Sexiness was equated with youth, and youth ruled. The most widespread age-related disease was not senility but juvenility.
— Tom Wolfe

It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature). — Julian Barnes

A Church which has lost its memory is in a sad state of senility. — Henry Chadwick

For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him. — William Osler