Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
Age is rarely despised but when it is contemptible.
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Our years / Glide silently away. No tears, / No loving orisons repair / The wrinkled cheek, the whitening hair/That drop forgotten to the tomb.
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We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
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It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, any more than they grow stronger or healthier or honester.
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As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence.
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Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, / And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins.
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I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
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Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.
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An old goat is never the more reverend for his beard.
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It is not becoming to lay to virtue the weariness of old age.
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Old age is not / a total misery. Experience helps.
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The power of love itself weakens ahd gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.
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Oftener than not the old are uncontrollable; / Their tempers make them difficult to deal with.
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Alas, how right the ancient saying is: / We, who are old, are nothing else but noise / And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, / And have no wits, although we think us wise.
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We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count.
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Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.
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Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.
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When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.
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No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.
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Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our times are in His hand / Who saith “A whole I planned, / Youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor he afraid!'
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Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.
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Old men are always young enough to learn, with profit.
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Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.
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Beyond age, leaf / withered, man goes three footed / no stronger than a child is, / a dream that falters in daylight.
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Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.
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Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?
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There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and wilfully go wrong for fear of being controlled.
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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An obstinacy’s ne’er so stiff, / As when ’tis in a wrong belief.
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Obstinacy / standing alone is the weakest of all things / in one whose mind is not possessed by wisdom.
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To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
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[W]hat necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?
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A stander-by may sometimes, peYhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.
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Observation is an old man’s memory.
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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness Qn the desert air.
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That which comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither respect nor patience.
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When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
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Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.
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Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.
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A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.
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We cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefits we receive must he rendered again line for line, deed for deed to somebody.
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There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
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All men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have long continued to please them.
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Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.
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A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as “robust."
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More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
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The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.
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The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.
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