Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Old age

"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it reserves it by giving it the abolute dimension – “As unto himself eternity changes him at last.” Death does away with time." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young." - Arthur Wing Pinero, fully Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

"Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

"The failure of the mind in old age is often less the results of natural decay, than of disuse. Ambition has ceased to operate; contentment bring indolence, and indolence decay of mental power, ennui, and sometimes death. Men have been known to die, literally speaking, of disease induced by intellectual vacancy." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet

"Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy, that gives indolence of body with an equality of mind; the best guardian of youth and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion, and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelary goddess of health and universal medicine of life." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet

"There is a bridge between time and eternity; and this bridge is Atman, the spirit of man. Neither day nor night cross that bridge, nor old age, nor death, nor sorrow. It is this spirit that we must find and know: man must find his own soul. He who has found and knows his soul has found all the worlds, has achieved all his desires." - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

"In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"It is wrong to believe that frank sentiments and the candor of the mind are the exclusive share of the young; they ornament oftentimes old age, upon which they seem to spread a chaste reflection of the modest graces of their younger days, where they shine with the same brightness as those flowers which are often seen peeping, fresh and laughing, from among ruins." - Achilles Poincelot

"The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. " - Florida Scott-Maxwell

"It is not the end of joy that makes old age so sad, but the end of hope." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

"Youth is the time to study wisdom; old age is the time to practice it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes, cease." - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter

"Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts; old age is slow in both." - Joseph Addison

"The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches

"Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success." - Louisa May Alcott

"One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up." - Malcolm Muggeridge

"The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them; not only because these never leave a Man, not even in the extremest Old Age; but because a Conscience bearing Witness that our Life was well-spent, together with the Remembrance of past good Actions, yields an unspeakable Comfort to the Soul." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world." - Maurice Chevalier, fully Maurice Auguste Chevalier

"I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton

"In youth we learn, in old age we understand." - Mexican Proverbs

"Youth is a folly; maturity, a struggle; old age a remorse." - Mexican Proverbs

"My love you, my children. Very few people will accept the medicine of wisdom. The mind refuses wisdom. But if you do agree to accept it, you will receive the grace, and when you receive that grace, you will have good qualities. When you acquire good qualities, you will know true love, and when you accept love, you will see the light. When you accept the light, you will see the resplendence, and when you accept that resplendence, the wealth of the three worlds will be complete within you. With this completeness, you will receive the kingdom of God, and you will know your Father. When you see your Father, all your connections to karma, hunger, disease, old age will leave you." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

"The most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty." - Napoleon Hill

"In the dimension of time, consciousness is experienced as the eternal present with a strong element of teleology: It is the future that pulls rather than the past that pushes. Some traditional views of man interpret the present as determined by the past. Specifically, these views hold that present events or problems are the workings out of early programing. Maturity then becomes the resolution of childhood conflicts.... An alternative interpretation of the situation is to seek ways to outgrow, i.e., genuinely overcome, a problem.... Genuine growth is the experience of being pulled or attracted by a goal in the future (Aristotle's final cause or telos), not that of being pushed into action (Aristotle's efficient cause or aitia). And in directing our gaze to the future, we utilize whatever material from the past we deem appropriate, including the use of the past to interfere with the future. Under this analysis, the past becomes almost irrelevant in the experience and conception of the present. Men like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Bertrand Russell were able to maintain joy, growth, and vigor in old age because the future and not the past was experienced as determining their present." - Peter Koestenbaum

"In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavorable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium. " - Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin

"At any age we must cherish illusions, consolatory or merely pleasant; in youth, they are omnipresent; in old age we must search for them, or even invent them. But with all that, boredom is their natural and inevitable accompaniment." - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

"A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality. " - Pindar NULL

"In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long." - Pope Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini NULL

"Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally." - Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert

"To save the life of a relative who is soon going to die of old age has less of an impact on the gene pool of the future than to save the life of an equally close relative who has the bulk of his life ahead of him." - Richard Dawkins

"Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up...I don't know what I should do: two states of mind in me." - Sappho NULL

"If the child does not cry, the mother knows not its wants." - Russian Proverbs

"When men shall roll up space as if it were a piece of hide, then there will be an end of misery without one’s cultivating the Knowledge of the Lord, who is without parts, without actions, tranquil, blameless, unattached, the supreme bridge to Immortality, an like a fire that has consumed all its fuel." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir

"Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling ." - Thomas Hardy

"Attempting to debate with a person who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to the dead." - Thomas Paine

"Mr. Washington knows that this was untrue; and knowing this, he had good reason to himself for refusing to furnish the House of Representatives with copies of the instructions given to Jay, as he might suspect, among other things, that he should also be called upon for copies of instructions given to other Ministers, and that, in the contradiction of instructions, his want of integrity would be detected. Mr. Washington may now, perhaps, learn when it is too late to be of any use to him, that a man will pass better through the world with a thousand open errors upon his back than in being detected in one sly falsehood. When one is detected, a thousand are suspected." - Thomas Paine

"The still small voice is wanted." - William Cowper

"It is a truly sublime spectacle when in the stillness of the night, in an unclouded sky, the stars, like the world's choir, rise and set, and as it were divide existence into two portions,--the one, belonging to the earthly, is silent in the perfect stillness of night; whilst the other alone comes forth in sublimity, pomp, and majesty. Viewed in this light, the starry heavens truly exercise a moral influence over us; and who can readily stray into the paths of immorality if he has been accustomed to live amidst such thoughts and feelings, and frequently to dwell upon them? How are we entranced by the simple splendors of this wonderful drama of nature!" - Wilhelm von Humboldt, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt

"In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty." - Will and Ariel Durant

"Even over cold pudding, the coward says ~’It will burn my mouth.” – African Proverb" -

"Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Old age comes not alone." - Welsh Proverbs

"It is now clear to me that the family is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the family: issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the family." - Virginia Satir

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm." - Victor Hugo

"Behold and Acknowledge the Glory that you have witnessed; proclaim the joy that you have experienced; confer the Grace that you have earned." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"Talkative persons easily step into scandal mongering. Too much talk and a tongue addicted to scandal are twins; they work together and in unison." - Atharva Veda, or Atharvaveda

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains." - Ursula Le Guin, fully Ursula Kroeber Le Guin