Age quotes
6.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside age — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing."
"But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime; An age that melts with unperceived decay, And glides in modest Innocence away"
"To proportion the eagerness of contest to its importance seems too hard a task for human wisdom. The pride of wit has kept ages busy in the discussion of useless questions, and the pride of power has destroyed armies, to gain or to keep unprofitable possessions."
"Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age."
"Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible."
"Hoc age ['do this'] is the great rule, whether you are serious or merry; whether ... learning science or duty from a folio, or floating on the Thames. Intentions must be gathered from acts."
"One of the aged greatest miseries is that they cannot easily find a companion able to share the memories of the past."
"Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, - judgement, to estimate things at their true value."
"Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution."
"Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science."
"It is man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age."
"The only way to save Social Security is to raise the retirement age."
"Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are."
"We [women] have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that ... takes time."
"There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in."
"... the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depend."
"It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare."
"Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up."
"Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death."
"Other people salted away money for their old age, but Nanny preferred to accumulate memories."
