Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
Ambrose Bierce
1. "A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do."
Lois Wyse, "Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother"
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
2. "Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation."
Lois Wyse, "Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother"
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
3. "Age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read."
Francis Bacon
4. "The secret of a long life is knowing when it's time to go."
Michele Shocked
Other categories: Life and Death
5. "A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Love in the Time of Cholera"
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
6. "There is no such thing as the old age of the wise."
Sophocles
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
7. "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."
Gérard Depardieu
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes -:- Truth and Falsity
8. "When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex."
Prue Leith
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
9. "Life begins at forty."
Walter B. Pitkin, "Life begins at forty"
Other categories: Life and Death
10. "Age becomes reality when you hear someone refer to "that attractive young woman standing next to the woman in the green dress", and you find that you're the one in the green dress."
Lois Wyse, "Funny, You Don't Look Like a Grandmother"
11. "Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret."
Benjamin Disraeli, "Coningsby"
Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia
12. "In America, every female under fifty calls herself a "girl.""
H.E. Bates, "Summertime"
Other categories: Woman and Man
13. "Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up."
Joseph Barth
Other categories: Marriage
14. "You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older."
Anouk Aimée
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
15. "I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own."
Margaret Atwood
16. "Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts."
Jose Ortega y Gasset, "The Revolt of the Masses"
17. "Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul."
André Maurois, "The Art of Living"
18. "Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form."
André Maurois, "The Art of Living"
Other categories: Work and Laziness
19. "Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses."
Francis Bacon, "Essays"
Other categories: Marriage -:- Woman and Man
20. "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."
Francis Bacon, "Essays"
Other categories: Success and Fame
21. "Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own."
Doug Larson
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
22. "The purpose of life is to fight maturity."
Dick Werthimer
Other categories: Various
23. "The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models."
James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name"
24. "From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture."
William Somerset Maugham, "Cakes and Ale"
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
25. "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
Pablo Picasso
Other categories: Art and Culture
26. "Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards."
George Orwell, "Collected Essays"
27. "When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners."
Zora Neale Hurston, "Moses Man of the Mountain"
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
28. "The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence."
Denis Waitly
Other categories: Family and Loneliness -:- Education
29. "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."
John Barrymore
Other categories: Dreams and Desires -:- Sorrow and Nostalgia
30. "After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies."
Cynthia Ozick
31. "By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."
Charles Wadsworth
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
32. "In youth we learn; in age we understand."
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Other categories: Education
33. "A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."
Henry Louis Mencken
Other categories: Art and Culture
34. "Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example."
François de La Rochefoucauld
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
35. "Beware of the young doctor and the old barber."
Benjamin Franklin
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
36. "All diseases run into one: old age."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
37. "It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth."
Vincent Van Gogh
38. "Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you."
Cyril Connolly
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
39. "Gray hair is God's graffiti."
Bill Cosby
40. "Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men."
Kin Hubbard
41. "Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese."
Luis Bunuel
42. "Age is the perfect extinguisher for the fire of youth."
Navjot Singh Sidhu
43. "The difference between men and boys is the price of their toys."
(?)
Other categories: Various
44. "A man has reached middle age when he is cautioned to slow down by his doctor instead of by the police."
(?)
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
45. "You can only be young once but you can be immature forever."
Dave Barry
46. "A young person knows the rules but the old person knows the exceptions."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
47. "Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter."
Satchel Paige
48. "There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."
Erma Bombeck
Other categories: Joy and Sadness
49. "Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you."
Fran Lebowitz
Other categories: Science and Technology
50. "You have reached middle age when the phone rings on Saturday night, you pray it isn't for you."
Ogden Nash
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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