Sourced

• All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?
  • Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago. Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and I realize it's me.
  • Dave Allen, The Independent (1993)

• I recently turned 60. Practically a third of my life is over.
  • Woody Allen, The Observer Review]] (1996)

• When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past — and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.
  • Jean Anouilh, Time Remembered

• Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
  • Jack Benny, New York Times (1974)

• No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.
  • Cicero, De senectute

• A man is as old as he's feeling, a woman is as old as she looks.
  • Mortimer Collins, The Unknown Quantity

• As we grow old....the beauty turns inward.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

• We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

• If youth only knew; if only age could.
  • Henri Estienne, Les Prémices (1594)

• An old goat is never the more reverend for his beard.
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

• Old age is not so fiery as youth, but when once provoked cannot be appeased.
  • Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia

• Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing seems real except what is unreal.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Over the Teacups

• To an old man any place that's warm is homeland.
  • Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths

• When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
  • Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

• Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.
  • Joseph Joubert, Pensees

• Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and having people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.
  • Phillip Larkin, The Old Fools (1974)

• I've changed my attitudes about what it means to age. Sometimes people decide it's their lot in life to be old, but people like Grandma bring color and excellence to their lives. That's what I've tried to do, too. I'm looking forward to the next stage.
  • Cloris Leachman, reported in Bill Adler, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001), p. 19.

• Old age has its pleasures, which though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

• Age imprints more wrinkles on the mind than it does on the face.
  • Montaigne, Essays

• I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
  • William Shakespeare, Richard II

• There are so few who can grow old with a good grace.
  • Richard Steele, The Spectator (1712)

• Old age is the most unexpected of things that can happen to a man.
  • Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile (1959)

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

• An aged Christian with the snow of time on his head may remind us that those points of earth are whitest that are nearest heaven.
  • Edwin Hubbell Chapin, p. 439.

• Thanks to that regular and temperate course of life I have ever lived, I am still capable of taking an active part in these public scenes of business. In fine, he who fills up every hour of his life in such kind of labors as those I have mentioned, will insensibly slide into old age without perceiving its arrival; and his powers, instead of being suddenly and prematurely extinguished, will gradually decline by the gentle and natural effect of accumulated years.
  • Cicero, p. 438.

• The day of life spent in honest and benevolent labor comes in hope to an evening calm and lovely; and though the sun declines, the shadows that he leaves behind are only to curtain the spirit unto rest.
  • Henry Giles, p. 438.

• It is not so bad a thing to grow old; it is only getting a little nearer home; a little nearer to immortal youth.
  • Arthur Henry Kenney, p. 439.

• Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
  • George MacDonald, p. 439.

• The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe.
  • William Mountford, p. 438.

• The years of old age are stalls in the cathedral of life in which for aged men to sit and listen and meditate and be patient till the service is over, and in which they may get themselves ready to say "Amen" at the last, with all their hearts and souls and strength.
  • William Mountford, p. 439.

• My God! my time is in Thine hands. Should it please Thee to lengthen my life, and complete, as Thou hast begun, the work of blanching my locks, grant me grace to wear them as a crown of unsullied honor.
  • Christian Scriver, p. 439.

Unsourced

• Age is only a physical phenomenon. I feel I am a 25-year-old trapped in a 50-year-old's body... it's true: the mind is 'willing' but the body is "wane-ing"!!!
  • (PunjaWala MandavGadh)

• Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.
  • Pietro Aretino

• Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that 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

• Growing old is no more than a bad habbit which a busy man has no time to form.
  • André Maurois, quoted in The Aging American

• A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
  • Groucho Marx

• An old man loved is winter with flowers.
  • German proverb

• I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.
  • Rita Mae Brown

• I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
  • Tom Stoppard

• Numbers never grow old, that’s why they have nothing in common with age.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov

• Old age: loss of dignity.
  • Swami Raj

• Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.
  • Charles Dickens

• The whole business of marshaling one's energies becomes more and more important as one grows older.
  • Hume Cronyn

• There are only three ages for women in Hollywood — Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
  • Goldie Hawn

• Times go by: reputation increases, ability declines.
  • Dag Hammarskjold

• To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
  • Bernard Baruch

• We are always the same age inside.
  • Gertrude Stein

• When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
  • R. C. Sherriff

• When you become senile, you won't know it.
  • Bill Cosby

• When young we are faithful to individuals, when older we grow loyal to situations and to types.
  • Cyril Connolly

• When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
  • Mark Twain

• You will become a hypocrite, you'll become a liar. You'll try and paper up your own cracks... and that's what being an adult is all about. Then you have babies and... *shrug* that's it. *long pause* Sorry! (laughs)
  • Thom Yorke

• Your life only tips into old age if regrets begin to outnumber dreams.
  • Peter Baskerville

• Growing old isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.
  • Maurice Chevalier

Anonymous

• Age before beauty.

• Age brings wisdom, but pain brings understanding.

• Age is a bad traveling companion.
  • English proverb

• To be mature is to accept imperfections
  • Fortune cookie

• Age is nothing but a number
  • Dove Chocolate Promise Message

• There are no charms or medicine against old age.
  • Anonymous, quoted in The Journal of Negro History, Edited by Carter G. Woodson, Volume 1 Number 1 (1916)