We all age and become older, from birth to death. As we get older, we may know more than we did when we were younger. We also are more likely to have bodies that don’t work as well as they once did. Aging has its advantages and disadvantages, and they aren’t always what our first reactions might be. The “winter of our life” can be meaningful and it can be discouraging. Pundits and poets have weighed in on the meaning and experience of aging.
How does one keep from ‘growing old inside’? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people…. Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.
In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.
One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
Nothing inspires more reverence and awe in me than an old man who knows how to change his mind.
Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.
Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside — from others. We do not accept it willingly.
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
I don’t want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.
The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.
History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs, — privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.
An old goat is never the more reverend for his beard.
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of forty is simply a loss of energy.
My eyes and my mind keep taking me where my old legs can’t keep up.
When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.
