Old Age Quotes (11)
Get up at five, have lunch at nine,
Supper at five, retire at nine,
And you will live to ninety-nine.
Supper at five, retire at nine,
And you will live to ninety-nine.
I have had a fairly long life, above all a very happy one, and I think that I shall be remembered with some regrets and perhaps leave some reputation behind me. What more could I ask? The events in which I am involved will probably save me from the troubles of old age. I shall die in full possession of my faculties, and that is another advantage that I should count among those that I have enjoyed. If I have any distressing thoughts, it is of not having done more for my family; to be unable to give either to them or to you any token of my affection and my gratitude is to be poor indeed.
Letter to Augez de Villiers, undated. Quoted in D. McKie, Antoine Lavoisier: Scientist, Economist, Social Reformer (1952), 303.
See also: | Advantage (6) | Affection (4) | Death (95) | Event (20) | Family (5) | Gratitude (3) | Letter (3) | Life (169) | Regret (3) | Reputation (3) | Trouble (6)
I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.
Letter to Charles Augustin Ferriol, comte d'Argental (1767). In Raymond C. Rowe, Joseph Chamberlain, A Spoonful of Sugar (2007), 243.
See also: | Doctor (25)
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 unfavourable 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.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), 293.
See also: | Animal (63) | Charles Darwin (171) | Evolution (237) | Evolution (237) | Experience (59) | Society (33) | Survival Of The Fittest (23)
Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.
Agamemnon, 584. In John Bartlett, Familar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs (1891), 695.
No old Men (excepting Dr. Wallis) love Mathematicks.
Comment made by Newton to William Whiston. Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), 139.
Old age is but a second childhood.
In Aristophanes and Thomas Mitchell (trans.), 'The Clouds', The Comedies of Aristophanes (1822), 148.
See also: | Child (41)
The principal objection to old age is that there is no future in it.
To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Commenting on his 85th birthday.
Commenting on his 85th birthday.
Quoted in Newsweek (29 Aug 1955). In Alfred J. Kolatch, Great Jewish Quotations (1996), 38.
See also: | Biography (159)
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
Quoted in Freeman Dyson, 'Mathematician, Physicist, and Writer.' Interview with D J Albers, The College Mathematics Journal, 25, No. 1, Jan 1994.
Youth disserves; middle age conserves; old age preserves.
