Topic

Age

Not a lament but a study. Cicero's advice to become an old man in good time if you wish to be one long leads a collection that examines the gains and losses of time with clear eyes. Lamb and Bronte on the resilience and rigidity of memory; Sophocles on growing young again; King on quality over length. The funnier voices — Holmes on double charm, Marquis on always being fifteen years younger than old age — keep the tone from becoming elegiac. The best pieces here do not console: they describe. They are useful when you are thinking about what changes with time, what stays the same, and what can still be shaped.

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If you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them.

Source: Sense and Sensibility (1811)

The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.

Source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793)

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter

Education is the best provision for the journey to old age

Live as long as you may. The first twenty years are the longest half of your life

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

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay

At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; and at 40 the judgment

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.

To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she could not part with it

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams