Great Throughts Treasury

"Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

"Regeneration is the ransacking of the soul, the turning of a man out of himself, the crumbling to pieces of the old man, and the new moulding of it into another shape... Has thou a new heart and renewed affections? And dost thou serve God in newness of life and conversation?" - Ezekial Hopkins

"We took to ourselves the old farmer's saying, "live as though you would die tonight. Farm as though you would live forever."" -

"All Buddhas and all ordinary beings are nothing but the one mind. This mind is beginningless and endless, unborn and indestructible. It has no color or shape, neither exists nor doesn't exist, isn't old or new, long or short, large or small, since it transcends all measures, limits, names and comparisons. It is what you see in front of you. Start to think about it and immediately you are mistaken. It is like the boundless void, which can't be fathomed or measured." - Huang Po, also Huángbò Xīyùn

"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age." - Victor Hugo

"It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear." -

"Old disease patterns keep replicating themselves when the old thought patterns stay the same. All healing techniques serve to bring about a change in consciousness, which means a new expectancy of wholeness. What you expect at the deepest level is what you get. Your body loves to hear the truth about itself. Your body cannot help but respond to an awareness of and an expectancy of wholeness." - Richard and Mary-Alice Jafolla

"Our minds grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew." - William James

"We have an old saying in Japan that a woman cannot love a man who is truly vain, for there is no crevice in his heart for love to enter and fill up." - Okakura Kahuzo

"I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time, and how much I have to do in so little time." - Sheila Kaye-Smith

"A generation without a cause in its youth has no legacy in its old age." - Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy

"Along with being forever on the move, one is forever in a hurry, leaving things inadvertently behind - friend or fishing tackle, old raincoat or old allegiance." - Louis Kronenberger

"Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age." - Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL

"No one ever regarded the first of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sound of bells (bells the music highest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year. I never heard it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelve-month. All I have done or suffered, performed or neglected - in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight of a contemporary, when he exclaimed: “I saw the skirts of the departing year.” It is no more than what is sober sadness, every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking." - Charles Lamb

"Study is the bane of boyhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and restorative of old age." - Edwin Herbert Land

"Things become old through excess of vigour." -

"Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting." - Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin

"What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom... The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences... the world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. It can't pigeon-hole a new experience." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

"Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul." - Douglas MacArthur

"The old thoughts never die. Immortal dreams outlive their dreamers and are our for aye; no thought once form’d and utter’d can expire." - Charles Mackay

"War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention." - Henry Maine, fully Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

"There is no such thing as an old woman. Any woman of any age, if she loves, if she is good, gives a man a sense of the infinite." - Jules Michelet

"As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified." -

"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth; instead of its introducing dismal and melancholy prospects of decay, it should give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world." - Thomas W. Palmer

"In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long." - Nikita Ivanovich Panin

"To be able to live in strict conformity with nature is what the men of old defined as the end of happiness." - Philo, aka Philo of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, Yedidia, "Philon", and Philo the Jew NULL

"Sickness is a sort of early old age; it teaches us a diffidence in our earthly state." - Alexander Pope

"He has existed only, not lived, who lacks wisdom in old age." - Publius Syrus

"No one grows old by living - only by losing interest in living." - Marie Beynon Ray

"It is good to respect old thoughts in the newest books, because the old works in which they stand are not read. New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard works, must be given forth every half-century." -

"No school is more necessary to children than patience, because either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age." -

"What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes, cease." -

"A man is not old as long as he is seeking something." - Jean Rostand

"Man has other enemies more formidable, against which he is not provided with such means of defense: these are the natural infirmities of infancy, old age, and illness of every kind, melancholy proofs of our weakness, of which the two first are common to all animals, and the last belongs chiefly to man in a; state of society." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"This world is a dream within a dream; as we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as he thinks from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of youth as visionary; and the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream. Death - the last sleep? No! it is the last and final awakening." -

"Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years." -

"We should cherish old age and enjoy it... Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest delights... How nice it is to have outworn one’s desires and left them behind." -

"When Leo Tolstoy was an old man he was planting little apple trees. His neighbor laughed at him and called him a silly old man, because when the apples finally grew he wouldn’t be around to eat them. Tolstoy told him, “Yes, but other people will eat them and they will think of me.” It think that’s what we’re supposed to do: leave more than we’ve found, give more than we’ve received, love more than we’ve been loved." - Yakov Smirnoff, born Yakov Naumovich Pokhis

"If the body is only the vehicle by which the soul can access the experience of physical living, then there is no real physical me. The soul (or life force) is the only real me. If you and I (the souls) want to achieve the most from this earthly lifetime, the more varied the experiences we should seek. That said, it’s too easy for you and me to fall into a comfort zone and try to avoid change. To keep this from happening, the experiences change rapidly as a result of the body moving from infancy though old age. The physical changes help to enhance our learning curve, our ability to serve, and our chance to evolve." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"When we destroy an old prejudice we have need of a new virtue." -

"That man never grows old who keeps a child in his heart." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"The old prayers... in which our fathers poured out their hearts to God, awaken our personal sentiments and blend them with the religious sentiments of the ages." - Heymann Steinthal. alternatively Hermann Steinthal

"The old stereotype of schooling that assumed that you "mastered a subject" is now obsolete. You can, hypothetically, lean all of the physics up until yesterday and will be lagging by tomorrow. Today we must conceive of the educated person, almost exclusively, as the one who comes out of school eager and able to go on to teaching himself." -

"We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity." -

"Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless." -

"There is no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow." - Edith Wharton

"The heart opens when we empty ourselves of old programming and return to the open, vulnerable, and authentic being we have always been. This True Self, the spark of divinity within us, is our link to God." - Charles L. Whitfield

"The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything." -

"You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it." - Tennessee Williams, fully Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams