Quotes About Age and Aging

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

— Oscar Wilde

We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice — that is until we have stopped saying “It got lost,” and say “I lost it.”

— Sydney J. Harris

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange — my youth.

— Sara Teasdale

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

— Margaret Halsey

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

— Victor Hugo

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age [thirty-five], he had already been dead for a year.

— Tom Lehrer

No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us — something more than we could learn ourselves, from a book.

— Cyril Connolly

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

— Muhammad Ali

The greatest thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.

— Madeleine L’Engle

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

— Don Marquis

He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

— Herbert Gold

Do not go gentle into that good night.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

— Tom Stoppard

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

— Gore Vidal

When I grow up, I want to be a little boy.

— Joseph Heller

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; at forty, the judgment.

— Benjamin Franklin

I refuse to admit that I am more than fifty-two, even if that does make my sons illegitimate.

— Nancy Astor (attrib.)

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age.  A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.

— Oscar Wilde

Thirty-five is a very attractive age.  London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

— Oscar Wilde

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.

— Irvin Cobb

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

— Elbert Hubbard

A woman is as old as she looks before breakfast.

— Edgar Watson Howe

Discussing how old you are is the temple of boredom.

— Ruth Gordon

Anyone can get old.  All you have to do is live long enough.

— Groucho Marx

My only fear is that I may live too long.

— Thomas Jefferson

All would live long, but none would be old.

— Benjamin Franklin

 ‘Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

— Lord Byron

I have been asked, “How do you grow old so easily?” I reply, “Very easily. I give all my time to it.”

— Emanuel Celler

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.

— Art Linkletter

Our nation’s long neglect of minorities whose skin is dark is perhaps only a little worse than our neglect of another minority whose hair is white.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

When you are about thirty-five years old, something terrible always happens to music.

— Steve Race

What he hath scanted men in hair, he hath given them in wit.

— William Shakespeare

Children are a great comfort in your old age — and they help you to reach it faster, too.

— Lionel M. Kauffman

The secret to a long life is to stay busy, get plenty of exercise, and don’t drink too much.  Then again don’t drink too little.

— Hermann Smith-Johannson, at age 103

I don’t care how old you get, I think a woman ought to stay sexy for her husband.

— Tammy Faye Bakker

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics.  Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

— George Jean Nathan

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

— Dorothy Canfield Fisher