You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older.

  The surest sign of age is loneliness.

  To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.

  The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.

  To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

  I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

  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.

  Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.

  I refuse to admit that I am more than 52, even if that makes my children illegitimate.

  Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.

  Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

  I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.

  We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.

  To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

  I hope I never get so old I get religious.

  Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. [2 Corinthians 4:16]

  In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.

  I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.

  To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.

  The tendency of old age to the body, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified.

  She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

  Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.

  You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

  I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.

  A woman's always younger than a man at equal years.

  Grow old with me the best is yet to come.

  Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

  We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

  In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

  Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese

  By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.

  How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

  To me -- old age is always ten years older than I am.

  It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow old in my own esteem --and in my esteem age is not estimable.

  Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is -- I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at -- a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.

  A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

  It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.

  Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

  Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.

  Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

  Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives.

  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.

  Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

  No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.

  You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.

  There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

  A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

  The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later.

  I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.

  Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

  He is so old that his blood type was discontinued.

  I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.

  At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.

  The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!"

  Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

  Keep on raging -- to stop the aging.

  At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths --your abilities and your failings.

  I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.

  Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. [Reflecting on his former status as a teen idol]

  For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

  Who soweth good seed shall surely reap; The year grows rich as it groweth old, And life's latest sands are its sands of gold!

  It is not how old you are, but how you are old.

  Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.

  I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.

  Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

  The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

  We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.

  The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

  If youth knew; if age could.

  Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.

  One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

  Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.

  I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

  An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. 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.

  If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

  Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

  Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.

  Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

  You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.

  It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on-screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that.

  The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

  A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

  Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

  There are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.

  Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

  I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

  Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.

  Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.

  The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

  To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

  Age, like distance lends a double charm.

  I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.

  Those who search beyond the natural limits will retain good hearing and clear vision, their bodies will remain light and strong, and although they grow old in years they will remain able-bodied and flourishing; and those who are able-bodied can govern to

  Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

  Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

  My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.

  At last now you can be what the old cannot recall and the young long for in dreams, yet still include them all.

  Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

  When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

  From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.

  How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

  In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.

  Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

  A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.

  For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

  The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

  Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

  Few people know how to be old.

  Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.

  The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

  It is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

  When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.

  The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

  I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.

  Like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.

  To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

  Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

  Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

  When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

  No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk --handsome, twenty-two year old.

  Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.

  If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

  Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.

  Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

  Don't just count your years, make your years count.

  How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!

  We are not limited by our old ages; we are liberate by it.

  Minds ripen at very different ages.

  Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

  Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I was born of the flesh in 1837, I was born of the spirit in 1855. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit shall live forever.

  Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.

  When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

  I think in twenty years I'll be looked at like Bob Hope. Doing those president jokes and golf shit. It scares me.

  In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don't know, but they do.

  The older you get the stronger the wind gets -- and it's always in your face.

  How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.

  My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

  You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.

  Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!

  The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!

  When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

  Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

  One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.

  You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

  It is a rare and difficult attainment to grow old gracefully and happily.

  In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

  The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

  Live your life and forget your age.

  Age-based retirement arbitrarily severs productive persons from their livelihood, squanders their talents, scars their health, strains an already overburdened Social Security system, and drives many elderly people into poverty and despair. Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

  Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.

  Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

  A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.

  Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

  One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.

  We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

  The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.

  Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

  Age considers; youth ventures.

  Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

  Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.

  Age does not matter if the matter does not age.

  I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

  There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

  The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

  Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.

  I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.

  Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

  Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

  With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. [Merchant Of Venice]

  The golden age is before us, not behind us.

  Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

  When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

  A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.

  The trick is growing up without growing old.

  When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

  Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

  If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

  Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.

  No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

  There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.

  None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

  I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

  Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

  I will never give in to old age until I become old. And I'm not old yet!

  For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

  Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

  Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

  Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.

  Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about it.

  They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.

  But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

  You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

  There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

  Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

  No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

  At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.

  An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

  The person of wisdom is the person of years.

  Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.